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

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!

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate or aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century.
Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage."

This definitive "Companion" provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study.

The "Companion" is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work.

The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the "Companion" consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.

Oscar Wilde in Vienna is the first book-length study in English of the reception of Oscar Wilde's works in the German-speaking world. Charting the plays' history on Viennese stages between 1903 and 2013, it casts a spotlight on the international reputation of one of the most popular English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural history in the long twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's plays against the background of political crises and social transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonisation within an environment positioned - like Wilde himself - at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity.

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

Moral electricity-a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century. As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, ""the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests."" The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

This work offers a wonderfully illustrated guide - and a rigorous analysis - of popular print and literature in all its many forms in the first half of the 19th century.It provides a unique collection of illustrated popular literature published between the events of 'Peterloo' in 1819 and the Great Exhibition of 1851, much never reprinted before. This was a time when the expansive growth of literacy led to the rapid and diverse evolution of popular culture, of publishing and print. This did much to transform the life experiences of millions. The printing press, combined with the railways and the telegraph, was a key agent of mass change.Louis James gives a picture of what the working classes were reading and a fascinating insight into their interest and concerns - their sports, work, crime, politics, religion and entertainments. His detailed introduction places all of this in its context of the contemporary cultural and social movements.The book profusely illustrates the fare which was offered: woodcut pictures, broadsheets and ballads, sensational Gothic novels issued in parts, newspapers and magazines, melodramatic penny dreadfuls published weekly in parts, and tracts of all kinds. The work examines this material in its many aspects, and from both sides of the social mirror. As well as showing the material, and analysing its significance, the book deals with official attempts to damp down or suppress the revolutionary new political and cultural press which served the new literacy. This did much to change taste, and ways of thinking and feeling. The book brings thus not only brings together a great deal of unusual and otherwise inaccessible illustration, it also offers a multi-facetted discussion of how the material was received, and its longer-term cultural influences.The new edition also includes a survey of studies in popular culture including song (A.L. Lloyd); the popular arts (Barbara Jones, Marx and Lambert, Panofsky, Gombrich); cartoons and graphic satire (Meisel, Maidment); the conventions and influence of popular melodrama and woodcuts, and a case study of the fiction of G.W.M. Reynolds. Also, a list of relevant web sites.

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

Centered around the themes of death, women as objects of desire, lost love, motherhood, and children, the poems in this selection offer insight into the work of this well-known abolitionist and advocate of women's rights. Including Grimke's prose and drama, which often focus on lynching, this volume sheds new light on a perspective characterized by the African-American experience of racial pride and the reaction against racists acts.

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.

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.

The poems of noted African-American poet Effie Waller Smith were popular in magazines and in book form. Collected in this volume, they provide insight into the life and experience of this admired turn-of-the-century poet.

Although children's plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rarely anthologized or even mentioned in reference books or histories of theatre, theatre historian and playwright Jonathan Levy found an embarrassment of riches when he set about developing this collection. Applying several criteria, which are noted in his preface, he found himself especially captivated by plays presenting scenes of real life and in which the dialogue sounds like the real talk of boys and girls of the period. Most of the plays remain interesting as plays to be read and perhaps produced, not just as historical curiosities. Included are plays representative of five major genres, which Levy identifies in his analytical introduction: Dramatic Proverbs and other moral tales; History Plays, including sacred and secular history; Sentimental Comedies; Fairy Tales and Eastern Tales; and Familiar Dialogues. Included among the playwrights are Charles Stearns (1753-1826), a Harvard graduate and tutor and prominent minister, and Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), an English writer known also for her Irish novels for adults and her writings on education. Each of the ten plays is prefaced by a biographical sketch on the playwright and critical notes on the play. Illustrations from some of the original publications are reprinted.

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.

Joseph Conrad ingeniously buried images from Polish literature and culture into his works. Once recognized, these references alter the accepted meanings of the texts. In an interview that was published in Kuryer Polski (in the then Polish city of Ostrawa, now in the Czech Republic) on 26 August 1915, Conrad himself declared about the nineteenth-century Polish poets: "Krasinski, Mickiewicz and Slowacki. Their words are everything for me. I was raised and formed by them." Yet, the Polish sources deeply rooted in Conrad's works have been scantily acknowledged and hardly explored, although notable intertextual theorists have argued that the ultimate understanding of the text comes from the intertext(s). The first part of this book analyzes Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, and four of his greatest works: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Unearthing the cache of Polish references in these works enhances our intellectual and aesthetic appreciation of Conrad as an artist par excellence. The signs recall literary and artistic works as well as aspects of social behavior, as Kristeva and Riffaterre explain. Bloom provides additional insight regarding the writer's struggle to supersede his predecessors. The second part of the book looks at two autobiographical works: A Personal Record and "A Familiar Preface." With poetic eloquence, Conrad proclaims his victory over his tragic past in A Personal Record. A tone of gaiety rises stubbornly in the midst of complete awareness of sorrow. The tone of "A Familiar Preface" is also unmistakably triumphant. More than joyous, the merriment in these self-portraits celebrates many worldly achievements, but ultimately one great triumph. In his writings the English author has transcended bitter adversities by transfiguring dreadful facts into the perfection and permanence of art.

"Explosive Narratives: Terrorism and Anarchy in the Works of Emile Zola "explores the genealogy of modern day terrorism through a close study of the anarchist figure in three of Emile Zola's novels: "Germinal," " Paris," and "Travail." The study links the crisis of representation registered at the end of the 19th century with the rise of terrorism embodied in the bomb-throwing anarchist. It thereby traces Zola's evolving thoughts on anarchy from the terrorist to the humanitarian reformer, from class warfare to a peaceful artisan commune, from a naturalist depiction of an elusive reality to a utopian writing fleeing the contingencies of the historical. The volume brings together aesthetic, political, urban, and scientific debates of Belle Epoque France and it will thus be of great interest not only to Zola scholars, but also to students of late 19th-century politics and art.

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

Frederick Douglass, once a slave, was one of the great 19th century American orators and the most important African American voice of his era. This book traces the development of his rhetorical skills, discusses the effect of his oratory on his contemporaries, and analyzes the specific oratorical techniques he employed. The first part is a biographical sketch of Douglass's life, dealing with his years of slavery (1818-1837), his prewar years of freedom (1837-1861), the Civil War (1861-1865), and postwar years (1865-1895). Chesebrough emphasizes the centrality of oratory to Douglass's life, even during the years in slavery. The second part looks at his oratorical techniques and concludes with three speeches from different periods. Students and scholars of communications, U.S. history, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and African American studies will be interested in this book.

This is the first full-length analysis of Gothic to draw on the ideas of the noted Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Historical analyses of works including Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein demonstrate how the Gothic novel incorporates a range of contemporary literary and non-literary discourses. The book also analyses the question of whether Gothic can be seen as a characteristically female genre.

Highly spiritual, the work in this collection represents both previously published and unpublished material by Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, a notable and neglected black woman writer. Including short fiction, poetry, and drama, her work fills a lacuna in the understanding of the literature of the nineteenth century.

Such novels as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days have made Jules Verne the most widely translated of all French authors. But he has typically been categorized as the father of science fiction or a writer of harmless fantasies for children. Now, in this brilliantly original new book, Andrew Martin relocates Verne squarely at the centre of the literary map. Dr Martin shows that a recurrent narrative (exemplified in short stories by Napoleon Bonaparte and Jorge Luis Borges), relating the strange destiny of a masked prophet who revolts against an empire, runs through Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. This approach illuminates the paradoxical coalition in Verne of realism and invention, repression and transgression, imperialism and anarchy. In this book Verne emerges not just as a key to the political and literary imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but as a model for reading fiction in general.

London's adventure tale The Call of the Wild explores the complex relationships between man and nature, and animals' struggle with their own nature in man's world. In this interdisciplinary study, a rich collection of primary documents point out the many issues that make this story as poignant and pertinent today as when it was written nearly a century ago. Compiled here for the first time is documentation from sources as varied as century-old newspaper accounts, legislative materials, advertisements, poetry, journals, and other startling firsthand accounts. The story's historical setting, the Yukon Gold Rush, is brought vividly into focus for readers, with firsthand accounts of the unimaginable hardships faced by the prospectors in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields. Central to their story and to their very survival were the dogs that served man's ambitions. Tribute to the sled dog is given in an historical 1879 piece The Value of Dogs from the Sketches of Life in the Hudson Bay Territory. This casebook also investigates endangered species legislation and the history of animal welfare concerns, focusing on the treatment of dogs in particular, surveying over a century of public sentiment. Students are introduced to The Call of the Wild with an insightful literary analysis exploring a mythological interpretation and a discussion of its main thematic premise, the fundamental struggle for freedom. Each subsequent chapter of this casebook focuses on an important topic, such as animal welfare, contextualizing these issues with primary documents. Students will find these materials and the related essays invaluable in understanding not only The Call Of the Wild but also the historical and pertinent social issues it addresses. Each topic section of this casebook offers ideas for thought-provoking class discussions, debates, and further research. Suggestions for further reading on these topics are also given.

The late 19th and early 20th century was a key period of cultural transition in Ireland. Fiction was used in a plainly partisan or polemical fashion to advance changes in Irish society. Murphy explores the outlook of certain important social classes during this time frame through an assessment of Irish Catholic fiction. This highly original study provides a new context for understanding the works of canonical authors such as Joyce and George Moore by discussing them in light of the now almost forgotten writing from which they emerged--the several hundred novels that were written during the period, many of them by women writers.