THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 are brand new and have been specifically designed for AS and A2 students to help you get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced examiners and teachers to give you an expert understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. This edition covers Frankenstein and includes: An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text. York Notes for AS & A2 are also available for these popular titles: The Bloody Chamber(9781447913153) Doctor Faustus(9781447913177) The Great Gatsby(9781447913207) The Kite Runner(9781447913160) Macbeth(9781447913146) Othello(9781447913191) WutheringHeights(9781447913184)

An indispensable resource for readers investigating Victorian literature and culture, this book offers a comprehensive summary of the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts of Victorian England. The Victorian era was a time of great social, scientific, and cultural change. The literary works of that period reflect that change and help us to better understand the Victorian world. This book examines the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of several important Victorian literary works: Jane Eyre,, by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights,, by Emily Bronte; A Tale of Two Cities,, by Charles Dickens; and several poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, including "The Cry of the Children," "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "A Curse for a Nation," and Aurora Leigh.. The volume provides historical explanations, literary analyses, and cultural context for each literary work, including primary documents from the nineteenth century. Topics investigated include women's rights, workers' rights, education reforms, marriage laws, race relations, inheritance and heredity, and other issues concerning gender, race, and class in the nineteenth century. Readers will gain a greater understanding of these major literary works as well as their historical context. Includes an introduction on background information about the Victorian era Presents a timeline of information about the period and context for the literary works discussed Explores the historical background of the literary works Excerpts primary source documents to give readers first-hand accounts of the issues addressed in the texts

Set in Ireland prior to its achieving legislative independence from Britain in 1782, Castle Rackrent tells the story of three generations of an estate--owning family as seen through the eyesaand as told in the voiceaof their longtime servant, Thady Quirk, recorded and commented on by an anonymous Editor. This edition of Maria Edgeworth's first novel is based on the 1832 edition, the last revised by her, and includes Susan Kubica Howard's foot-of-the-page notes on the text of the memoir as well as on the notes and glosses the Editor offers "for the information of the ignorant English reader." Howard's Introduction situates the novel in its political and historical context and suggests a reading of the novel as Edgeworth's contribution to the discussion of the controversial Act of Union between Ireland and Britain that went into effect immediately after the novel's publication in London in 1800.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Barrett Browning's work within the rich context of her life and writing career. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the reception of Barrett Browning as a writer within an explicitly female tradition has tended to limit the appreciation of her wider contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as a ringleted romantic heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction-from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. The selection of works presented here appear in the order in which they were originally published, enabling students and readers to experience the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Barrett Browning, and a Chronology.

This book is a wide-ranging collection of the key contextual documents which inform the Romantic period. It includes material on fiercely debated areas such as the French Revolution, women, the slave trade, science and religion. Documents are supported by substantial editorial material, drawing connections to the major Romantic texts.

Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."

This volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883-1884 includes 178 letters, of which 117 are published for the first time, written from January 2, 1883, to January 29, 1884. The letters trace the development of Henry James's literary career as well as the maturation of his international reputation as a public figure. They also record James's recovery following the deaths of his parents and brother, the difficult execution of his father's will, and his return to England from an extended stay in the United States. This volume concludes with James's continuing efforts to maximize his writing income.

J. M. Barrie, Victorian novelist, playwright, and author of Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, led a life almost as magical and interesting as as his famous creation. Childless in his marriage, Barrie grew close to the five young boys of the Llewelyn Davies family, ultimately becoming their guardian and devoted surrogate father when they were orphaned. Andrew Birkin draws extensively on a vast range of material by and about Barrie, including notebooks, memoirs, and hours of recorded interviews with the family and their circle, to describe Barrie's life and the wonderful world he created for the boys. Originally published in 1979, this enchanting and richly illustrated account is reissued with a new preface to mark the release of Neverland, the film of Barrie's life, and the upcoming centenary of Peter Pan. "A psychological thriller . . . one of the year's most complex and absorbing biographies."-Gerald Clarke, Time "A terrible and fascinating story."-Eve Auchincloss, Washington Post

The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor's legacy in popular culture, including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms, and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

In a world that is increasingly reliant on science, technology, and virtual relationships, our reciprocal and intimate connection to place has often been overlooked. This concern is now at the forefront of debate among environmental planners and designers, who are asking: What is distinctive and memorable about a certain place? Who lives there - or once did? What are the impacts of metropolitan growth, sprawl, and the loss of family farms? In ""Literature of Place"", Melanie Simo looks beyond crowded malls and boarded-up storefronts on Main Street to our collective memory, finding answers to these questions in stories, novels, memoirs, poetry, essays, diaries, travel writing, and nature writing that range in origin from New England and the Southern Highlands to Hawaii and in subject from little gardens to lost or reinhabited places in cities, mill towns, deserts, and woodlands. In her consideration of selected American works from 1890 to 1970 - years that mark the closing of the Western frontier and later openings in space exploration, environmental protection, genetic engineering, and cyberspace - Simo uncovers a literature of place and the often-surprising relationship of place to our daily lives. While the exploration of outer space and cyberspace may now seem limitless, some planners and designers are rediscovering ways of building from an earlier time and reconsidering the importance of place. In ""Literature of Place"" Simo furthers this movement by retrieving some common threads of attachment to place in works by John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Henry James, Robert Frost, Wallace Stegner, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Loren Eiseley, Wendell Berry, J B Jason, Jane Jacobs, and others. By reconsidering works by such diverse and often surprisingly unknown writers, Simo seeks to broaden our understanding of place and stimulate the imagination of those who are creating and preserving memorable places in our time. A companion volume to ""Forest and Garden: Traces of Wilderness in a Modernizing Land, 1897-1949"" (Virginia 2003), ""Literature of Place"" will appeal to urban designers, architects, landscape architects, environmental planners, literary and social historians, and all who are concerned about the fate of places in an increasingly ""small"" and remotely controlled world.

In the age of Enlightenment the concept of night evolved from being a time of dread to a time for pleasure. Between the start of the Regence (1715-1723) and the French Revolution the nocturnal and the erotic became intrinsically connected: shadows and darkness were reconfigured as the object of the philosophes' fascination, while night was increasingly experienced as the realm of the self. Nowhere is this paradigmatic shift better recorded than in French libertine literature of the long eighteenth century. Marine Ganofsky delves into the night scenes of libertine fiction to analyse how the idea of night was reimagined and represented by writers ranging from Crebillon to Sade. Her original analysis of erotic encounters in pornographic novels, gallant stories and sensual fairy tales reveals how they capture the period's emancipation from superstitions and traditions. The nocturnal settings of these libertine narratives were the primary means of staging men and women's hitherto hidden sexual encounters and innermost fantasies, and ultimately illustrate the conquest of night-time terrors in favour of social encounters and amorous intimacy. Libertine nocturnal scenes reflect above all the Enlightenment's re-invention of shadows less as an obstacle than an incentive to discover the mysteries they harbour. Through her innovative research Marine Ganofsky presents the erotic nights of libertine fiction as a sign that the siecle des Lumieres, free to enjoy the charms to be found in, or under, the cover of darkness, was also the siecle de la nuit.

Meir Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction presents a bold new reading of one of Denmark's greatest writers of the nineteenth century, situating him, first and foremost, as a Jewish artist. Offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, Gurley examines Goldschmidt's relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinical traditions, such as the Talmud and the Midrash. At the same time, he shows that Goldschmidt's midrashic style in a secular context predates certain narrative movements within Modernism that are usually associated with the twentieth century and especially Czech writer Franz Kafka. Goldschmidt was remarkable in his era, both as a writer who explored his peripheral identity in the mainstream of European culture and as a writer of the first truly Jewish bildungsroman. In this groundbreaking study of Goldschmidt's narrative art, Gurley refashions his position in both the Danish and Jewish literary canons and introduces his extraordinary work to a wider, non-Scandinavian audience.

'She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited form the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, 'The Storm'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens's four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim 'to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land'.

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-2. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to the devils that drove the Gadarene swine over the precipice in his vision of a society possessed by demonic creatures that produce devastating delusions of rationality. Dostoevsky is at his most imaginatively humorous in Devils: the novel is full of buffoonery and grotesque comedy. The plot is loosely based on the details of a notorious case of political murder, but Dostoevsky weaves suicide, rape, and a multiplicity of scandals into a compelling story of political evil. _ This new translation also includes the chapter `Stavrogin's Confession', which was initially considered to be too shocking to print. In this edition it appears where the author originally intended it. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. _ _

Alongside Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron possesses a star-quality unlike other classic British authors. His life as poet, philanderer, homosexual, and freedom fighter is legendary, and this new selection from his powerful letters and journals tells the story from the inside, in Byron's own racy and passionate style. Though Byron is chiefly known as a poet, his letters and journals are one of the glories of English prose literature, and one of the greatest British acts of autobiography, alongside Pepys' Diary and Boswell's Journal. This new selection, taken from the authoritative and unbowdlerized edition prepared by Leslie Marchand in the 1970s, not only provides the cream of his informal prose; it amounts to a biography in Byron's own words. No other English writer lived so remarkable an existence, from rented rooms in Aberdeen to a Nottinghamshire peerage, from European fame to English infamy, and notorious Italian exile to a glorious death in the Greek War of Independence.The letters and journals are selected, introduced, and annotated to provide a running narrative of the life and career of his remarkable man in his own unmistakable words.

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he. Written under appalling personal circumstances when Dostoevsky was travelling in Europe, The Idiot not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most incisive indictment of Russia's struggling to emulate contemporary Europe and sinking under the weight of Western materialism. This new translation by Alan Myers is meticulously faithful to the original and has a critical introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In recent cultural studies, poetry has become something of a neglected genre. Warwick Slinn seeks to reverse that trend and argues that a fundamental continuity between the meaning of a poetic trope and the social function of language can be established through speech act theory--specifically through the linguistically based model of performativity.

Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique discusses five Victorian poems in order to show how their display of language enacts a cultural critique, examining the conditions and realization of social and political discourses. Slinn begins by distinguishing the main conceptual strands of performativity and then explains how each poem dramatizes a fluid mix of identity, power, and ideology. By foregrounding such events as speech acts, these poems expose the politics of power relationships and show how performative language is inextricable from the means by which power relationships are enacted. Focusing on the internal dynamics of specific poems, Slinn challenges the separation of poetic language from social criticism and eventually questions traditional perceptions of poetic form itself.

The selected poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Augusta Webster, offer a range of contentious issues that are in themselves politically challenging. The poets address such diverse and problematic concerns as slavery, sexual politics, prostitution, consciousness, agency, aestheticism, religious belief, and philosophical idealism. The discussion of each poem attends to the complexity of the poem's utterance, its historical contexts, and its broader implications for cultural meaning.

E. Warwick Slinn, Associate Professor in the School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, New Zealand, is the author of Browning and the Fictions of Identity and The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (Virginia).

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

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,

`Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!' A powerful poem of universal guilt and a protest against capital punishment, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's best-known poem, yet it is quite unlike the rest of his poetry. At Oxford Wilde discarded the passion and politics of his mother's Irish nationalistic anti-famine poetry and opted to follow an English Romantic tradition, paying tribute to Keats, Swinburne, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Admiration of French masters gradually led to his writing Impressionist, even decadent poems and his collection Poems (1881) brought accusations of obscenity and plagiarism as well as scathing reviews. Unabashed, Wilde revised and reprinted his final `Author's Edition' in 1892, by which time he was the successful author of fiction, criticism, and Lady Windermere's Fan. This volume follows as closely as possible the chronological order of composition, highlighting autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism. The Appendix shows Wilde's original ordering, constructed with great care around a `musical' arrangement of themes. The poems reveal unexpected aspects of a literary chameleon usually identified with sparkling wit and social comedy. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This gathering of eleven original essays with a substantive introduction brings the traditional image of Emerson the Transcendentalist face-to-face with an emerging image of Emerson the reformer. "The Emerson Dilemma" highlights the conflict between Emerson's philosophical attraction to solitary contemplation and the demands of activism compelled by the logic of his own writings.

The essays cover Emerson's reform thought and activism from his early career as a Unitarian minister through his reaction to the Civil War. In addition to Emerson's antislavery position, the collection covers his complex relationship to the early women's rights movement and American Indian removal. Individual essays also compare Emerson's reform ethics with those of his wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, his aunt Mary Moody, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and Margaret Fuller.

The Emerson who emerges from this volume is one whose Transcendentalism is explicitly politicized; thus, we see him consciously mediating between the opposing forces of the world he "thought" and the world in which he lived.

`I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD,' wrote Dickens of what is the most personal, certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels. Dickens wrote the book after the completion of a fragment of autobiography recalling his employment as a child in a London warehouse, and in the first-person narrative, a new departure for him, realized marvellously the workings of memory. The embodiment of his boyhood experience in the novel involved a `complicated interweaving of truth and fiction', at its most subtle in the portrait of his father as Mr Micawber, one of Dickens's greatest comic creations. Enjoying a humour that never becomes caricature, the reader shares David's affection for the eccentric Betsey Trotwood and her protege Mr Dick, and smiles with the narrator at the trials he endures in his love for the delightfully silly Dora. Settings, (East Anglia, the London of the 1820s), people, and events are unified by their relationship to the story of Steerforth's treachery, which reaches its powerful climax in the storm scene. This edition, which has the accurate Clarendon text, includes Dickens's trial titles and working notes, and eight of the original illustrations by `Phiz'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.