Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) is one of the great undiscovered geniuses of Victorian literature. His poetry expresses the religious doubt of the age as well as exposing its sexual hypocrisy. His life is packed full of relationships and encounters with some of the great names of the 19th century; Florence Nightingale, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, the Arnolds and so on. Clough's early death at the age of 42, worn down, it is said, by working as a factotum for Nightingale, was widely seen as a personal tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Now Kenny, the distinguished philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, proposes to write three first major biography of Clough in thirty years. It is a task that has attracted others- Claire Tomalin for example- but Kenny is supremely qualified to do so. Not only is he already the editor of Clough's diaries, he has unrivalled insights into the world that contributed to Clough's tortured existence and has a lifelong knowledge of Clough's work. Additionally, Kenny has access to letters and other papers at Balliol, which have never been used by any biographer. In Kenny's biography, Clough will be re-established as one of the great Victorian poets (a judgement shared by Christopher Ricks in his 1987 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse) and also a significant personality of the Victorian stage.

Willa Cather's novels "Oh Pioneers " and "My Antonia" are at once accurate representations of life on the midwestern prairies in the era of their first settlement and continuations of a literary tradition that stretches back to Virgil and other classical writers who celebrated nature and pondered humanity's place within it. Both novels are given full literary treatment here with close examination of the timeless themes of love, loss, the transience of youth, and the influence of the land itself on people's lives. For readers who want to go beyond the subjects of these novels, to enter the places and eras Cather immortalized in her writing, this casebook also situates the two novels within their historical contexts with a rich array of documentation. Letters and journals from the late 1800s and early 1900s help readers understand the hardships and rewards of everyday life on the plains. Poignant personal accounts as well as government reports document the special challenges women and immigrants faced on the frontier. Readers will also be able to explore how the issues in Cather's novels continue to shape American culture today. Reports from congressional hearings and personal interviews give varied perspectives on the disappearance of the family farm and an USDA timeline chronicles the causes and ongoing ramifications of this important issue.

Students and their teachers will find a wealth of valuable information for their classroom discussions and research projects in this interdisciplinary casebook. Each topic chapter offers ideas for oral and written exploration as well as lists of further suggested readings. Students will not only gain a better understanding of Cather's novels here, but will be able to make connections between their thematic concerns and contemporary social issues.

The Victorian Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It is a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent work. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature.

This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory.

Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Bronte, and Keats.

"Romantic Sobriety" combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

The Lucid Veil is conceived as a sequel to The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams. It gives a comprehensive account of the philosophic background of Victorian poetics. It is the first study to attempt to relate the theory and practice of poetry in the Victorian period to changing axioms of knowledge and perception. it will become a major work of reference and a new point of departure in the study of Victorian thought, philosophy, language and poetry. The author is Professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto.

This companion is an invaluable aid to modern readers in understanding Dickens's book, as it examines both specific details and the broader context of the story. To discover the meaning of a difficult detail or idea, the reader needs only find the appropriate chapter in DEGREESIThe Companion DEGREESR, look for the italicized phrase that identifies the relevant paragraph, and then read the discussion of the word or passage in question, which will be marked in bold. The book is the result of extensive original research and will appeal to both scholars, secondary school students and amateur Dickens enthusiasts. From details about food, costume, and transport to the political and social concerns of the day, DEGREESIThe Companion DEGREESR will open up Dickens's world in an accessible, fascinating way.

This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's 'lines on virtue' written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's Asolando (1889). The Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including Aurora Leigh and Men and Women (1845-61); Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. The book provides not only precise dating but much matter on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their many friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

This volume provides a critical introduction to eight landmark novels in 19th- and 20th-century French literature, including The Plague, Madame Bovary, and The Little Prince. Timeless literary masterpieces-such as Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and The Miserables (1862), Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Camus' The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947)-have been the subject of copious literary criticism since their publications. This volume has been developed specifically to help students and general readers reach a deeper understanding of eight French novels, enabling them to develop a true appreciation for why the works have been regarded as masterpieces. Lucid yet challenging literary analysis focuses on plot and character development, themes, style, and biographical and historical context. This guide offers a fuller sense of the historical and literary environment in which each author worked. Librarians and educators were consulted in determining which eight novels to include. In addition to those listed above, full treatment is given to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and the perennially popular tale The Little Prince. These eight works cover a time period of more than 100 years, reflecting the development of the French novel and the literary movements of this era. An introductory essay provides a concise overview of French literature through the 1800's and early 1900's, identifying additional seminal works beyond those fully discussed here. For readers desiring to pursue further research, an extensive bibliography has been compiled, offering sources for additional novels, criticism, reviews from the time of publication, and biographical information.

This volume in the "York Notes Companions "series looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history.

This volume looks back to the origins of Modernism and the traditions that shaped it, examining texts from France, America, England and Ireland to provide a stimulating and original take on this unique movement in literary history.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Gary Day is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

From Blake to Wordsworth to Woolstonecroft and Walpole, this volume in the "York Notes Companions" series gives an accessible introduction to Romantic literature with essential guides to themes, contexts, and literary criticism.

From Blake to Wordsworth to Woolstonecroft and Walpole, this volume in the York Notes Companions series gives an accessible introduction to Romantic literature with essential guides to themes, contexts, and literary criticism.

• This book contains a wealth of essential information to create a complete guide to the period and is part of the first series to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview to the period
• Dr John Gilroy is an experienced lecturer and author who has published extensively in the field
• The book contains features to improve the reader's understanding, including annotated timelines, bibliographies, and further reading
  

An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the "fin de siecle"'s aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates - focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender - supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.

Ornamental Aesthetics offers a theory of ornamentation as a manner of marking out objects for notice, attention, praise, and a means of exploring qualities of mental engagement other than interpretation and representation. Although Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were hostile to the overdecorated rooms and poems of nineteenth-century culture, their writings are full of references to chandeliers, butterflies, diamonds, and banners which indicate their primary investment in ornamentation as a form of attending. Theo Davis argues that this essential quality of ornamentation has been obscured by the enduring emphasis of literary studies on the structure of representation, and on how meaning is embodied in material form. Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's sense of ornamentation as a manner of attending is grounded in an understanding of poetry as an adornment to the world, and thus as a way of relating to what is present rather than of representing it. Ornamental Aesthetics investigates the aesthetic practices of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman through readings of the writings of Martin Heidegger, which also presents the human mind as an agitated, responsive, and ornamental presence. Drawing together work in poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Ornamental Aesthetics ultimately argues that the kinds of immediate experience of attending which concerns ornamentation should retain a central place in the study of literature and the humanities more broadly.

Reading Hardy's Landscapes locates the essential energy of the novels in the descriptive details as much as in the story. The emphasis is on the author's habits of vision and imagination. It is instinctive in Hardy to locate his tales between the huge abstractions of time and space and the minute particularities of nature - a leaf, a minnow, a gnat. His human dramas unfold in a landscape and are part of that landscape, caught up in larger patterns of movement and change.

In the struggle for democratic reform, and in its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution represented a broad humanistic spirit that swept across Europe at the close of the 18th century. The Revolution fostered one of the largest and broadest debates in literary and cultural history, a war of ideas that encompassed philosophy, theories of history, the study of language, and the history of art. This debate is reflected in a large body of literature that extends well into the 19th century. The debate in England was particularly strong, and in 1789, the London Corresponding Society remarked that the French Revolution was the topic to which all thinking minds were drawn. During the 20th century, scholars have given much attention to the link between the Revolution and Romanticism.

Within this volume, expert contributors examine the centrality of the French Revolution to English culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book offers a sweeping exploration of the diverse effects of the Revolution in verbal and visual art, poetry and prose, history and fiction, politics and religion, and philosophy and language theory. Among the figures discussed are Edmund Burke, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. By analyzing a broad range of writers and artists who shaped and were shaped by the French Revolution, the volume dramatizes the scope and diversity of the debate, thus offering an interdisciplinary analysis of the debate as a whole and an emphasis on the extent to which all thinking minds were drawn to the topic.

This book provides a wealth of fascinating information about many significant and lesser-known nineteenth-century Christian authors, mostly women, who were motivated to write material specifically for children's spiritual edification because of their personal faith. It explores three prevalent theological and controversial doctrines of the period, namely Soteriology, Biblical Authority and Eschatology, in relation to children's specifically engendered Christian literature. It traces the ecclesiastical networks and affiliations across the theological spectrum of Evangelical authors, publishers, theologians, clergy and scholars of the period. An unprecedented deluge of Evangelical literature was produced for millions of Sunday School children in the nineteenth century, resulting in one of its most prolific and profitable forms of publishing. It expanded into a vast industry whose magnitude, scope and scale is discussed throughout this book. Rather than dismissing Evangelical children's literature as simplistic, formulaic, moral didacticism, this book argues that, in attempting to convert the mass reading public, nineteenth-century authors and publishers developed a complex, highly competitive genre of children's literature to promote their particular theologies, faith and churchmanships, and to ultimately save the nation.

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

This book brings the study of nineteenth-century illustrations into the digital age. The key issues discussed include the difficulties of making illustrations visible online, the mechanisms for searching the content of illustrations, and the politics of crowdsourced image tagging. Analyzing a range of online resources, the book offers a conceptual and critical model for engaging with and understanding nineteenth-century illustration through its interplay with the digital. In its exploration of the intersections between historic illustrations and the digital, the book is of interest to those working in illustration studies, digital humanities, word and image, nineteenth-century studies, and visual culture.

A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author’s previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge’s other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.

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.

The theatre and drama of the late Georgian period have been the focus of a number of recent studies, but such work has tended to ignore its social and political contexts. Theatric Revolution redresses the balance by considering the role of stage censorship during the Romantic period, an era otherwise associated with the freedom of expression. Looking beyond the Royal theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane which have dominated most recent accounts of the period, this book examines the day-to-day workings of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and shows that radicalized groups of individuals continuously sought ways to evade the suppression of both playhouses and dramatic texts.
Incorporating a wealth of new research, David Worrall reveals the centrality of theatre within busy networks of print culture, politics of all casts, elite and popular cultures, and metropolitan and provincial audiences. Ranging from the drawing room of Queen Caroline's private theatrical to the song-and-supper dens of Soho and radical free and easies, Theatric Revolution deals with the complex vitality of Romantic theatrical culture, and its intense politicization at all levels. This fascinating new study will be of great value to cultural historians, as well as to literary and theatre scholars.

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!

In an unprecedented phenomenon that swept across Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers, advertisers, and architects began to create and sell images of an authentic cultural realm paradoxically considered outside the marketplace. Such images were located in nostalgic pictures of an idyllic, pre-industrial past, in supposedly original objects not derived from previous traditions, and in the ideal of a purified aesthetic that might be separated from the mass market. Presenting a lively, unique study of what she terms the "commodified authentic," Elizabeth Outka explores this crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity with a piercing look at consumer culture and the marketing of authenticity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.
The book brings together a wide range of cultural sources, from the model towns of Bournville, Port Sunlight, and Letchworth; to the architecture of Edwin Lutyens and Selfridges department store; to work by authors such as Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.