Biographies of America's greatest humorist abound, but none have charted the overall influence of the key male friendships that profoundly informed his life and work. Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship presents a welcome new perspective as it examines three vastly different friendships and the stamp they left on Samuel Clemens's life.
With accessible prose informed by impressive research, the study provides an illuminating history of the friendships it explores, and the personal and cultural dynamic of the relationships. In the case of Twain and his pastor, Joseph Twichell, emphasis is put on the latter's role as mentor and spiritual advisor and on Twain's own waning sense of religious belonging. Messent then shifts gears to consider Twain's friendship with fellow author and collaborator William Dean Howells. Fascinating in its own right, this relationship also serves as a prism through which to view the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century America. A third, seemingly unlikely friendship between Twain and Standard Oil executive H.H. Rogers focuses on Twain's attitude toward business and shows how Rogers and his wife served as a surrogate family for the novelist after the death of his own wife.
As he charts these relationships, Messent uses existing work on male friendship, gender roles, and cultural change as a framework in which to situate altered conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles, not just in marriage but in the larger social networks of their time. In sum, Mark Twain andMale Friendship is not only a valuable new resource on the great novelist but also a lively cultural history of male friendship in nineteenth-century America.

Carol A. Senf traces the vampire's evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Ultimately the grand passion of Jane and Rochester is called upon to survive cruel revelation, loss and reunion, only to be confronted with tragedy.

Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art.

Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire-but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction. Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.

While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, Curious Subjects makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both curiosities: strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious-relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive. What kinds of curiosity are possible and desirable, and what different kinds of knowledge do they yield? What sort of subject asks questions, seeks, chooses? Can a curious woman turn her curiosity on herself? Curious Subjects takes seriously the persuasive force of the novel as a form that intervenes in our sense of what women want to know and how they can and should choose to act on that knowledge. And it shows an astonishingly wide and subtly various range of answers to these questions in the British novel, which far from simply punishing women for their curiosity, theorized it, shaped it, and reworked it to give us characters as different as Alice in Wonderland and Dorothea Brooke, Clarissa Harlowe and Louisa Gradgrind. Schor's study provides thought-provoking new readings of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century-Hard Times, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, among others-and pushes well beyond commonplace historicist accounts of British culture in the period as a monolithic ideological formation. It will interest scholars of law and literature, narratology, and feminist theory as well as literary history more generally.

Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a periodical of national reach and scope among free African Americans), Black Print Unbound is thus at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals. The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder's ideological, political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real, traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material history to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a serialized novel-texts that were crucial to the development of African American literature and culture and that challenge our senses of genre, authorship, and community. In this, Black Print Unbound offers a case study for understanding how African Americans inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses of African American-and so American-literary history.

William Blake's The Four Zoas is one of the most challenging poems in the English language, and one of the most profound. It is also one of the least read of the major poetic narratives of the Romantic period. Spiritual History presents a much-needed introduction to the poem, although it will also be of great interest to those already familiar with it. This is the first full-length study to examine in detail Blake's numerous manuscript revisions of the poem. It offers a staged reading, one that moves, as Blake himself moved, from simpler to more complex forms of writing. Andrew Lincoln reads the poem in the light of two competing views of history: the biblical, which places history within the framework of Fall and Judgement, and that of the Enlightenment, which sees history as progress from primitive life to civil order. In so doing, he offers an account of the narrative that is more coherent - and accessible - than much previous criticism of the work, and Blake's much misunderstood poem emerges as the most extraordinary product of the eighteenth-century tradition of philosophical history.

In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality.
The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market.
Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.

Title: The Crown of Life.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Gissing, George; 1899. 360 p.; 8 . 012622.f.54.

Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest Russian writers, was the first to achieve real fame outside of his own country. He spent most of his adult life in Western Europe and started to write letters, not just to keep his friends informed of his progress, but 'in order to receive replies'. An entertaining and accomplished correspondent, he rarely objected to publication of his letters, which were written with that possibility in mind. This selection of full letters spans more than fifty years, from 1831 until just before Turgenev's death in September 1883. Turgenev enjoyed conversations by post, debating social and political questions, and issues in literature, art and music. Among his correspondents were major writers of the day (including Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) as well as friends and relations. Many of the letters reveal his views on contemporary literary and social events in Russia and Europe; others, to his publishers, translators and to aspiring authors, give some of his criteria for a writer. These letters will not provide an answer to the Turgenev enigma, but they do show many sides of this fascinating and mercurial man.The letters are in chronological sections. A biographical framework is provided both by the introductions to these sections and to individual letters, and by the inclusion of letters covering the main events of his life. This selection is an important contribution both to our knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century Russian and European history and literature. A.V. Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Liverpool and is the editor of the Tolstoy volume in The Critical Heritage series.

The conventional view of the family in the nineteenth-century novel holds that it venerated the traditional domestic unit as a model of national belonging. Contesting this interpretation, American Blood argues that many authors of the period challenged preconceptions of the family and portrayed it as a detriment to true democracy and, by extension, the political enterprise of the United States. Relying on works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, and others, Holly Jackson reveals family portraits that are claustrophobic, antidemocratic, and even unnatural. The novels examined here welcome, in Jackson's reading, the decline of the family and the exclusionary white-privileging American social order that it supported. Embracing and imagining this decline, the novels examined here incorporate and celebrate the very practices that mainstream Americans felt were the most dangerous to the family as an institution-interracial sex, doomed marriages, homosexuality, and the willful rejection of reproduction. In addition to historicized readings, the monograph also highlights how formal narrative characteristics served to heighten their anti-filial message: according to Jackson, the false starts, interpolated plots, and narrative dead-ends prominent in novels like The House of the Seven Gables and Dred are formal iterations of the books' interest in disrupting the family as a privileged ideological site. In sum, American Blood offers a much-needed corrective that will generate fresh insights into nineteenth-century literature and culture.

This study of Sherlock Holmes and panoptic power will intrigue both fans of the Holmes canon and anyone interested in the history of crime literature and how such a character has captured the imagination of countless generations. Dr Michael Plakotaris has succeeded in bringing together the most authoritative works on the matter to create a revealing insight into one of the most prominent figures of English literature. From comparisons between Holmes and his creator to studies of his Nietzschean personality, his panoptic-semiotic modus operandi and his successful relationship with Watson, we begin to understand the components used that created this astounding success in Victorian literature.

Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic. It tells of Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be descended from the ancient family of d'Urbeville. In her search for respectability her fortunes fluctuate wildly, and the story assumes the proportions of a Greek tragedy. It explores Tess's relationships with two very different men, her struggle against the social mores of the rural Victorian world which she inhabits and the hypocrisy of the age. In addressing the double standards of the time, Hardy's masterly evocation of a world which we have lost, provides one of the most compelling stories in the canon of English literature, whose appeal today defies the judgement of Hardy's contemporary critics.

Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.

Law and Literature: The Irish Case is a collection of fascinating essays by literary and legal scholars which explore the intersections between law and literature in Ireland from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sharing a concern for the cultural life of law and the legal life of culture, the contributors shine a light on the ways in which the legal and the literary have spoken to each other, of each other, and, at times, for each other, on the island of Ireland in the last three centuries. Several of the chapters discuss how texts and writers have found their ways into the law's chambers and contributed to the development of jurisprudence. The essays in the collection also reveal the juridical and jurisprudential forces that have shaped the production and reception of Irish literary culture, revealing the law's popular reception and its extra-legal afterlives. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Max Barrett, Noreen Doody, Katherine Ebury, Adam Gearey, Tom Hickey, James Kelly, Colum Kenny, David Kenny, Heather Laird, Julie Morrissy, Gearoid O'Flaherty, Virginie Roche-Tiengo, Barry Sheils.

A novel based on fact about the child prodigy who lived in Scotland from 1803-11.

The gruesome double-murder upon which the novel Crime and Punishment hinges leads its culprit, Raskolnikov, into emotional trauma and obsessive, destructive self-reflection. But Raskolnikov's famous philosophical musings are just part of the full philosophical thought manifest in one of Dostoevsky's most famous novels. This volume, uniquely, brings together prominent philosophers and literary scholars to deepen our understanding of the novel's full range of philosophical thought. The seven essays treat a diversity of topics, including: language and the representation of the human mind, emotions and the susceptibility to loss, the nature of agency, freedom and the possibility of evil, the family and the failure of utopian critique, the authority of law and morality, and the dialogical self. Further, authors provide new approaches for thinking about the relationship between literary representation and philosophy, and the way that Dostoevsky labored over intricate problems of narrative form in Crime and Punishment. Together, these essays demonstrate a seminal work's full philosophical worth-a novel rich with complex themes whose questions reverberate powerfully into the 21st century.

Originally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with "the very language of men" and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians' assertions - sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit - that writers were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book draws on both primary documents (such as dance treatises and performance reviews) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet's unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies of significant poems by Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Barrett Browning.

York Notes Advanced have been written by acknowledged literature experts for the specific needs of advanced level and undergraduate students. They offer a fresh and accessible approach to the Study of English literature. Building on the successful formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. York Notes Advanced help to make the study of literature more fulfilling and lead to exam success. They will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: Study methods - Introduction to the text - Summaries with critical notes - Themes and techniques - Textual analysis of key passages - Author biography - Historical and literary background - Modern and historical critical approaches - Chronology - Glossary of literary terms. General Editors: Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton; Professor A.N. Jeffares - Emeritus Professor of English, University of Stirling.

Harriet Martineau, versatile woman of letters, philosopher, and economist, was at the heart of Victorian literary and social life. This is the first wide-ranging selection of her letters to a variety of correspondents, most of them major figures in Victorian political and literary history. Controversial because of Martineau's lifelong resistance to the future publication of her private correspondence, the letters reveal her outspoken views on contemporary writers, the working classes, women's role in society, political change, illness, mesmerism, and her own writing. Her opinions on literary realism and George Eliot, biography and Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett's contribution to modern poetry are among the topics aired in these unashamedly forthright and often bigoted letters. Yet in her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau agrees with her friends `that it would be rather an advantage' to her than otherwise, to be known by her private letters. They allow the modern reader to enter fully into the spirit of Victorian social and literary controversy.