This book argues that embryology and the reproductive sciences played a key role in the rise of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diana Perez Edelman dissects Horace Walpole's use of embryological concepts in the development of his Gothic imagination and provides an overview of the conflict between preformation and epigenesis in the scientific community. The book then explores the ways in which Gothic literature can be read as epigenetic in its focus on internally sourced modes of identity, monstrosity, and endless narration. The chapters analyze Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance, The Italian, and The Mysteries of Udolpho; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer; and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that these touchstones of the Gothic register why the Gothic emerged at that time and why it continues today: the mysteries of reproduction remain unsolved.

In Moby-Dick's wide philosophical musings and central narrative arch, Daniel Herman finds a philosophy very closely aligned specifically with the original teachings of Zen Buddhism. In exploring the likelihood of this hitherto undiscovered influence, Herman looks at works Melville is either known to have read or that there is a strong likelihood of his having come across, as well as offering a more expansive consideration of Moby-Dick from a Zen Buddhist perspective, as it is expressed in both ancient and modern teachings. But not only does the book delve deeply into one of the few aspects of Moby-Dick's construction left unexplored by scholars, it also conceives of an entirely new way of reading the greatest of American books-offering critical re-considerations of many of its most crucial and contentious issues, while focusing on what Melville has to teach us about coping with adversity, respecting ideological diversity, and living skillfully in a fickle, slippery world.

Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical" readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150 years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures-in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

This book explores the relationship between nineteenth-century poetry and liberal philosophy. It carries out a reassessment of the aesthetic possibilities of liberalism and it considers the variety of ways that poetry by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne responds to and participates in urgent philosophical, social and political debates about liberty and the rule of law. It provides an account of poetry's intervention into four different sites where liberalism has a stake: the self, the university, married life and the nation state and it seeks to assert the peculiar capacity of poetry to articulate liberal concerns, proposing poetic language as a means of liberal enquiry.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children's literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. It explores how this liminal figure - a boy operating within a man's world - addresses adult anxieties about boyhood and the boy's transition to manhood. It investigates the literary, social and ideological significance of a vast array of popular detective narratives appearing in 'penny dreadfuls' and story papers which were aimed primarily at working-class boys. This study charts the relationship between developments in the representation of the fictional boy detective and changing expectations of and attitudes towards real-life British boys during a period where the boy's role in the future of the Empire was a key concern. It emphasises the value of the early fictional boy detective as an ideological tool to condition boy readers to fulfil adult desires and expectations of what boyhood and, in the future, proper manhood should entail. It will be of particular importance to scholars working in the fields of children's literature, crime fiction and popular culture.

Although Herman Melville's masterworks Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno have long been the subject of vigorous scholarly examination, the impact of African culture on these works has received surprisingly little critical attention. Presenting a groundbreaking reappraisal of these two powerful pieces of fiction, Sterling Stuckey reveals how African customs and rituals heavily influenced one of America's greatest novelists.
The Melville that emerges in this innovative, intertextual study is one profoundly shaped by the vibrant African-influenced music and dance culture of nineteenth-century America. Drawing on extensive research, Stuckey reveals how celebrations of African culture by black Americans, such as the Pinkster festival and the Ring Shout dance form, permeated Melville's environs during his formative years and found their way into his finest fiction. Also demonstrated is the extent to which the author of Moby-Dick is indebted to Frederick Douglass's depiction of music, especially the blues, in his classic slave narrative. Connections between Melville's work and African culture are also extended beyond America to the African continent itself. With readings of hitherto unexplored chapters in Delano's Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and other nonfiction sources--such as Joseph Dupuis's Journal of a Residence in Ashantee--Stuckey links Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick, pinpointing the sources from which Melville drew to fashion major characters that appear aboard both the Pequod and the San Dominick.
Combining inventive literary and historical analysis, Stuckey shows how myriad aspects of African culture coalesced to create the unique vision conveyed inMoby-Dick and Benito Cereno. Ultimately, African Culture and Melville's Art provides a wealth of insight into the novelist's expressive power and the development of his distinct cross-cultural aesthetic.

Classic 19th-century British novels that give full expression to complex ethical problems necessarily project the claims of conflicting or interfering values and thus complicate the strategies for resolving the dilemmas they dramatize. This book reasserts the importance of the ethics of reading. It analyzes a developing dialogue between moral philosophers and literary critics, all of whom in their different ways celebrate literature's capacity to confront us with values in conflict. They agree that a key reason for rereading and arguing about classic novels is that they often hypothesize moral dilemmas in more realistically particularized detail than any abstract, rational discussion of ethics could match. But even if novels provide specifically situated explorations of moral issues, this does not mean that they can resolve the problems they dramatize.

This book considers interfering values in novels by Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy and the difficulties in interpreting these works. Each novel has caused protracted disputes among critics because of its heroine and its conflicting values. Different readings of these novels reveal how critics engage in interpretive strategies to defend or deplore what they read. But while they try to articulate and limit the reader's responses, the novels break through the frames they would impose, thus enlarging our awareness of the problems of making judgments.

Christian Isobel Johnstone's Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott's Waverley; or 'tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh's literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott's. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England's economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.

This ninth volume presents about 1,100 letters, many unpublished, from the years 1859 to 1861. It records the writing of two major novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations; the planning and writing of a substantial amount of the three Christmas numbers of this period, `A Haunted House', `A Message from the Sea', and `Tom Tiddler's Ground'; and the establishment of All the Year Round as a new journal to succeed Household Words. It also shows Dickens's delight with his new Kentish home, Gad's Hill.

This book explores the significance of the now-lost pavilion built in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in the time of Queen Victoria for understanding experiments in British art and architecture at the outset of the Victorian era. It introduces the curious history of the garden pavilion, its experimental contents, the controversies of its critical reception, and how it has been digitally remediated. The chapters discuss how the pavilion, decorated with frescos and encaustics by some of the most prominent painters of the mid-nineteenth century, became the center of a national conversation about an identity for British art, the capacity of its artists, and the quality of Royal and public taste. Beyond an examination of the pavilion's history, this book also introduces a digital model which restores the pavilion to virtual life, underscoring the importance of the pavilion for Victorian aesthetics and culture.

This book of interdisciplinary essays serves to situate the original Sherlock Holmes, and his various adaptations, in a contemporary cultural context. This collection is prompted by three main and related questions: firstly, why is Sherlock Holmes such an enduring and ubiquitous cultural icon; secondly, why is it that Sherlock Holmes, nearly 130 years after his birth, is enjoying such a spectacular renaissance; and, thirdly, what sort of communities, imagined or otherwise, have arisen around this figure since the most recent resurrections of Sherlock Holmes by popular media? Covering various media and genres (TV, film, literature, theatre) and scholarly approaches, this comprehensive collection offers cogent answers to these questions.

Best known as the author of "Heart of Darkness" (1899), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is one of the most widely taught writers in English. His mastery of the English language is especially notable, for he was born in a Ukrainian area of Poland under Czarist Russian rule and began a sea career in France. He joined the British merchant fleet, and his travels took him to European imperial outposts throughout Asia, South America, and Africa. To pass the monotonous time on land between journeys, he began to write fiction in English. Never quite at home anywhere, he spoke a thickly accented mix of English, Polish, and French. He sometimes posed as a flirtatious Frenchman, a fallen Polish nobleman, and an English country squire and man of letters. Like many writers, his works reflect his experiences. Interest in his writings has become especially strong, in light of their relationship to marginality and postcolonialism.

As a reference book, this volume is a comprehensive guide to Conrad's troubled life and enduring literary legacy. An opening biographical chapter tells the story of his difficulties, adventures, and achievements. It also summarizes the current state of biographical research on Conrad and provides a useful context for approaching his works. The chapter that follows builds on the biography by discussing the importance of Conrad's letters to our understanding of his life and writings. Additional chapters examine each of his major works, while others address clusters of his later novels, his short fiction, and his essays and memoirs. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a combination of summary and original scholarship. Thus the volume provides important biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information to those readers new to Conrad, while it simultaneously gives experienced readers a wealth of fresh critical perspectives.

This book examines how the medical profession engaged with print and literary culture to shape its identities between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its empire. Moving away from a focus on medical education and professional appointments, the book reorients attention to how medical self-fashioning interacted with other axes of identity, including age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Drawing on medical journals and fiction, as well as professional advice guides and popular periodicals, this volume considers how images of medical practice and professionalism were formed in the cultural and medical imagination. Alison Moulds uncovers how medical professionals were involved in textual production and consumption as editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers. Ultimately, this book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between literature and medicine, revealing how the profession engaged with a range of textual practices to build communities, air grievances, and augment its cultural authority and status in public life.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it. Such commentators as Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent London and the relations among its varied populations, yet their accounts often undermined one another.

Whereas Victorian social science presumed a correlation between criminal activity, geographical residence, and social class, the popular literature of the period often sought just as strenuously to deny the link, giving rise to privileged and pathological offenders like Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. This in turn shifted attention away from the urban slums that had been the setting for the so-called Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s. By 1900, crime appears as a distinctively modern problem, requiring large-scale solutions and government intervention in place of an older approach that was rooted in personal morality or philanthropic paternalism.

Illustrating "literary geography" -- in which physical space is not merely a backdrop for the plot but an integral element in shaping textual meaning -- Simon Joyce's Capital Offenses reveals how certain geographical patterns can not only give weight to interpretive meanings already suggested in the texts but also enable us to read them in a new and surprising light.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This systematic approach to the study of literary works involves the search for mythological archetypes, parallels, paradigms, and motives in a literary text. In a new attempt at an integrated vision of literary works, Zubarev presents a comprehensive approach on the basis of mythopoetics. Her theory is verified through a close examination of four of Chekhov's major plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Zubarev presents a compelling approach to literary analysis, and explores the enigmatic roots of Chekhov's universal significance. Her mythopoetic study sheds light on why Chekhov's plays are moving in any language and in any time.

This book re-examines the critical debate regarding Hardy's attitude to women: apologist or misogynist? With the help of manuscript evidence and references to Hardy's autobiography, letters, literary notebooks, marginalia, and the letters of his wives, this book combines a biographical approach with a feminist reading. Significant space is devoted to the 'minor' novels, the short stories, and to Hardy's real life literary relations with his contemporary women writers, his protegees and his two 'scribbling' wives, to balance the hitherto exclusive focus on the 'major' novels.

This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation-of style, mode, voice, genre and language-has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as 'other'. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

This book examines two mid-nineteenth century thinkers - the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter and the French architect Eugene E. Viollet-le-Duc - who imagined cultural history on the model of earth history: as a history of objects to be restored and worlds to be reconstructed. The nascent field of geology shaped cultural thought; their conservationism, informed by erosion, envisions a future of restorative renewal.

This book explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. It concentrates on three very precise techniques for the production of social space (counter-mapping, overlaying and troping). The chapters show the scapes and writings which influenced him and the way he transformed them, packaged them and passed them on for future use. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities. This urban building with is transferable to other literatures and medial forms. The book offers vital understanding of how writing and image work in particular ways to recreate and re-enchant society and the built environment. It will be of interest to scholars of literature, media, film, urban studies, politics and economics.

This reference provides a detailed record of virtually every secondary study published on Oscar Wilde. The book also contains entries for Wilde's works, including various modern editions. The volume begins with a short chronology of Wilde's life and career. Sections listing books and periodical publications by Wilde follow. The next chapters contain entries for books, articles, and dissertations on Wilde. With the exception of the dissertations, the entries are accompanied by descriptive annotations. The bibliography concludes with an index of works by Wilde, an index of authors of secondary sources, and a general subject index.

Victorian Poetry in Context offers a lively and accessible introduction to the diverse range of poetry written in the Victorian period. Considering such issues as reform and protest, gender, science and belief this book sets out the social and cultural contexts for the poetry of a fast-changing era. Sections on Victorian poetics, form and Victorian voices introduce the key literary contexts of poetry's production, and poetic innovations of the period such as the dramatic monologue are highlighted . At the heart of the book is a focus on the importance of attentive close reading, with original readings offered of well-known texts alongside those that have recently received renewed attention within scholarship. The book also offers an overview of critical approaches to several key texts and discussion of how Victorian poetry has remained influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Victorian poetry.

This edited collection offers undergraduate Literature instructors a guide to the pedagogy and teaching of Victorian literature in liberal arts classrooms. With numerous essays focused on thematic course design, this volume reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the literature classroom. A section on genre provides suggestions on approaching individual works and discussing their influence on production of texts. Sections on digital humanities and "out of the classroom" approaches to Victorian literature reflect current practices and developing trends. The concluding section offers three different versions of an "ideal" course, each of which shows how thematic, disciplinary, genre, and technological strands may be woven together in meaningful ways. Professors of introductory literature courses aimed at non-English majors to advanced seminars for majors will find accessible and innovative course ideas supplemented with a variety of versatile teaching materials, including syllabi, assignments, and in-class activities.