Taken for Wonder focuses on nineteenth century travelogues authored by Iranians in Europe and argues for a methodological shift from the study of travel to that of writing travel. This shift allows for a different interpretive framework that moves away from an over-emphasis on the destinations of travel (particularly in cases where the destination, like Europe, signifies larger meanings such as modernity) and which historicizes the travelogue itself as a rhetorical text in the service of its origin's concerns and developments. Within this framework, this book demonstrates the ways in which travel writings to Europe were used to position Qajar Iran (1917-1925) within a global context, i.e. narration of travel to Europe was also narrating the power of the Qajar court even when political events were tipped against it; and relatedly, how both travel to Europe and also translations of travel narratives into Persian should be included in our understanding of the importance of geography and mapping to the Qajars, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this process, it also re-examines the notion that Iranian modernity was the chief outcome of Iranians travelling in and writing about Europe.

Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine. Balzac's Shorter Fictions explores this corpus, the nature of short fiction, and how Balzac's novels developed from his stories. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.

Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure "haram" flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child-agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In "Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature," Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self-reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature.
"Making Words Matter" contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self-imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Hai's work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.
This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.

Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration, 'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

This is the first major collection of letters by the Revolutionary-era woman writer. This volume gathers more than one hundred letters - most of them previously unpublished - written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay.Until now, Warren's letters have been published sporadically, in small numbers, and mainly to help complete the collected correspondence of some of the famous men to whom she wrote. This volume addresses that imbalance by focusing on Warren's letters to her family members and other women. As they flesh out our view of Warren and correct some misconceptions about her, the letters offer a wealth of insights into eighteenth-century American culture, including social customs, women's concerns, political and economic conditions, medical issues, and attitudes on child rearing.This title features letters that Warren sent to other women who had lost family members (Warren herself lost three children) reveal her sympathies; and, letters to a favorite son, Winslow, that show her sharing her ambitions with a child who resisted her advice. What readers of other Warren letters may have only sensed about her is now revealed more fully: she was a woman of considerable intellect, religious faith, compassion, literary intelligence, and acute sensitivity to the historical moment of even everyday events in the new American republic.

Born to Polish parents in what is now known as the Ukraine, Joseph Conrad would become one of the greatest writers in the English language. With works like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," and Heart of Darkness, he not only solidified his place in the panethon of great novelists, but also established himself as a keen-eyed chronicler of the social and political themes that animated the contemporary world around him. The original essays assembled here by John G. Peters showcase the abundance of historical material Conrad drew upon to create his varied literary corpus. Essays show how the author mined his early life as a sailor to pen gripping, realistic tales of nautical life while issuing scathing indictments of colonialism and capitalist cupidity in works like Almayer's Folly and Heart of Darkness. His unique sense of himself as an outsider is explored in relation to his pointed political novels that critiqued corruption and terrorism, most notably in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. In addition to his major works, essays consider Conrad's contributions as an innovative modernist and his unique role in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Complete with an up-to-date bibliography and illustrated chronology, A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad provides an invaluable resource to the life and work of the major novelist.

Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In "Mary Hallock Foote, " Darlis A. Willer examines the life of this gifted and spirited woman from the East as she adapted herself and her artistic vision to the West.

Foote's images of the American West differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers of the time. She depicted a more gentle West, a domestic West of families and settlements rather than a Wild West of soldiers, American Indians, and cowboys. Miller examines how Foote's career was molded by the East-West tensions she experienced throughout her adult life and by society's expectations of womanhood and motherhood.

This biography recounts Foote's Quaker upbringing; her education at the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union, New York; her marriage to Arthur De Wint Foote, including his alcohol problems; her life in Boise, Idaho, and later Grass Valley, California; her grief over the early death of daughter Agnes Foote; and the previously unexplored last two decades of her life.

Miller has made extensive use of every major archive of letters and documents by and about Foote. She sheds light on Foote's numerous stories, essays, and novels. And examines all pertinent sources on Foote's life and works.

Anyone interested in the American West, women's history, or life histories in general will find Miller's biography of Mary Hallock Foote fascinating,

This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. 'Modernism' here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary modernism associated with Georg Brandes, and such later nineteenth and early twentieth century figures as J. P. Jacobsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen (all often associated with Kierkegaard in early secondary literature), and the young Georg Lukacs. This movement, currently attracting increasing scholarly attention, fed into such varied currents of twentieth century thought as Bolshevism (as in Lukacs himself), fascism, and the early existentialism of, e.g., Shestov and the radical culture journal The Brenner (in which Kierkegaard featured regularly, and whose readers included Martin Heidegger). Each of these movements has, arguably, its own 'Romantic' aspect and Kierkegaard thus emerges as a figure who holds together or in whom are reflected both the aspirations and contradictions of early romanticism and its later nineteenth and twentieth century inheritors. Kierkegaard's specific 'staging' of his authorship in the contemporary life of Copenhagen, then undergoing a rapid transformation from being the backward capital of an absolutist monarchy to a modern, cosmopolitan city, provides a further focus for the volume. In this situation the early Romantic experience of nature as providing a source of healing and an experience of unambiguous life is transposed into a more complex and, ultimately, catastrophic register. In articulating these tensions, Kierkegaard's authorship provided a mirror to his age but also anticipated and influenced later generations who wrestled with their own versions of this situation.

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts-poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film-and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as the "love-hate relations" between the United States and England, the imperial center of the British Atlantic world. In contrast, this book explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture. It argues that, by allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain's Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectial relationship between nation and migration.

Gerard Manley Hopkins initially planned to become a poet-artist. For five years he trained his eye, learned about contemporary art and architecture, and made friends in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In her fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Phillips, whose knowledge of Hopkins's poems is second to none, uses letters, new archival material, and contemporary publications to reconstruct the visual world Hopkins knew between 1862 and 1889, and especially in the 1860s, with its illustrated journals, art exhibitions, Gothic architecture, photographic shows, and changing art criticism.
Phillips identifies three artistic contexts for the Hopkins's life: his childhood circle of artistic relatives who were important in shaping his early vision; his friends at university and the criticism he absorbed while there that inflected his view as a young man; and the mature religious beliefs which came to govern his understanding of a visual world interconnected with an eternal one.
With chapters devoted to Hopkins own drawings, and to visual theories of the time, Phillips is able to suggests fresh links between this visual world and the startling originality of Hopkins's mature writing that will impact radically on our understanding of Hopkins's practice as a poet.

"Introductions to British Literature and Culture" are practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series are designed to help introduce a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, literary and critical contexts and acting as an initial map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period. This accessible introduction to Victorian literature and its contexts from 1837-1901 includes: an overview of the historical, cultural and intellectual background including politics and economics, popular culture, philosophy and religion; a survey of the developments in key genres including discussion of major writers such as the Brontes, the Brownings, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Hardy, Rossetti, Shaw, Swinburne, Tennyson and Wilde; concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism; a guide to key critical approaches; a chronology mapping historical events and literary works; and guided further reading including websites and electronic resources.

This encylopedic study illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascinations with the fairies and the dominant obsessions of the larger culture. Drawing on anthropological, folkloric, historical and medical sources, Silver anatomizes a world of strange beings -real and imaginary - who infiltrate the literary and visual masterpieces of the era.

The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau's writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau's claim that humans may function as "scribes of nature." However, these studies of Thoreau's antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.

This is a concise but comprehensive guide to Tolstoy's literary and philosophical writings, focusing on aspects of his work that students find most difficult.Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the most important writers in the Western tradition. His two great, giant novels, "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", are regarded as pinnacles of the genre; they cover an enormous range of basic human experiences with a precision and probing spirit that, in the words of one critic, are simply 'unmatched by any other writer.'This guide offers students a clear introduction to Tolstoy's literary works from his major novels to the shorter novels and texts, including "Hadji Murat" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". The guide also covers major themes, including sex, death, authority and evil and offers an overview of Tolstoy's religious and philosophical thought. A final chapter assesses his lasting influence in the spheres of literature and culture, religion and philosophy and on major figures, including Joyce, Ghandi, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. This is a comprehensive and readable guide to one of the most remarkable writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century." Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

May Sinclair (1863-1946) was a bestselling novelist who was one of the first British women to go out to the Belgian front in 1914. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian draws on newly discovered manuscripts to tell the story of this woman whose emotional isolation bears witness to the great price Victorian women had to pay for their intellectual freedom.

The Clarendon edition of Adam Bede (1859) is the first critical edition of the work that established George Eliot's reputation. Its extensive textual apparatus lists manuscript and first edition variants from the copy-text, which is the corrected eighth edition of 1861--her last revision of the book. The introduction locates the genesis of the novel in Eliot's family history, her travels, and her reading of literature and biography, and describes the composition process.

Faced with Coleridge's irresolution and fragmentariness, critics have often declared him a failure. This study champions that failure as an oblique kind of success - the fruit of a virtuous and fertile indecision between rival imaginative vocations, each good but incompatible. Covering the entire range of his religious and philosophical prose and criticism, it also offers close readings of the major poems and describes afresh the momentous relationship with Wordsworth.

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton's life and writing in new, exciting ways. The essays in this volume expand our sense of Wharton as a novelist of manners and reflect the latest developments in new historicism and cultural studies.

Nicholas Grene explores Yeats's poetic codes of practice, the key words and habits of speech that shape the reading experience of his poetry. Where previous studies have sought to decode his work, expounding its symbolic meanings by references to Yeats's occult beliefs, philosophical ideas or political ideology, the focus here is on his poetic technique, its typical forms and their implications for the understanding of the poems. Grene is concerned with the distinctive stylistic signatures of the Collected Poems: the use of dates and place names within individual poems; the handling of demonstratives and of grammatical tense and mood; certain nodal Yeatsian words ("dream," "bitter," "sweet") and images (birds and beasts); dialogue and monologue as the voices of his dramatic lyrics. The aim throughout is to illustrate the shifting and unstable movement between lived reality and transcendental thought in Yeats, the embodied quality of his poetry between a phenomenal world of sight and an imagined world of vision.

The 1928 Turkish alphabet reform replacing the Perso-Arabic script with the Latin phonetic alphabet is an emblem of Turkish modernization. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey traces the history of Turkish alphabet and language reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, examining its effects on modern Turkish literature. In readings of the novels, essays, and poetry of Ahmed Midhat, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Omer Seyfeddin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Peyami Safa, and Nazim Hikmet, Nergis Erturk argues that modern Turkish literature is profoundly self-conscious of dramatic change in its own historical conditions of possibility. Where literary historiography has sometimes idealized the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful project of Westernizing modernization, Erturk suggests a different critical narrative: one of the consolidation of control over communication, forging a unitary nation and language from a pluralistic and multilingual society.
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Trollope and the Church of England is the first detailed examination of Trollop's attitude towards his Anglican faith and the Church, and the impact this had on his works. Jill Durey controversially explodes the myth that Trollope's most popular characters just happened to be clerical and were simply a skit on the Church, by revealing the true extent of his lifelong fascination with religion.

First published in 1968, this reissue of Dr. Craik 's critical appreciation of the completed novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront is seminal for the way in which it shifts emphasis away from the Bront family biography towards a detailed critical analysis of the novels themselves.

Separate chapters are given to each of the seven novels. The author 's aims and techniques in each are assessed and Dr. Craik shows what light the books throw on each other, how they are related to the novels of the Bront 's predecessors, and how the Bront novels compare with their great contemporaries in the nineteenth century novel.

Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered--in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period's poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms. The ten essays in "Meter Matters "showcase the range of metrical practice of poets from Wordsworth and Byron to Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson; at the same time, the contributors bring into focus some of the metrical theorizing that shaped poetic thinking and responses to it throughout the nineteenth century. Paying close attention to the historical contours of Romantic and Victorian meters, as well as to the minute workings of the verse line, "Meter Matters "presents a fresh perspective on a subject that figured significantly in the century's literature, and in its culture.