Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social, and religious critic.

This is a monograph offering new analysis of the philosophical connection between Hopkins and Heidegger which has been repeatedly mentioned but not fleshed out in the literature of either literary criticism or philosophy. "Hopkins & Heidegger" is a new exploration of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetics through the work of Martin Heidegger. More radically, Brian Willems argues that the work of Hopkins does no less than propose solutions to a number of hitherto unresolved questions regarding Heidegger's later writings, vitalizing the concepts of both writers beyond their local contexts. Willems examines a number of cross-sections between the poetry and thought of Hopkins and the philosophy of Heidegger. While neither writer ever directly addressed the other's work - Hopkins died the year Heidegger was born, 1899, and Heidegger never turns his thoughts on poetry to the Victorians - a number of similarities between the two have been noted but never fleshed out. Willems' readings of these cross-sections are centred on Hopkins' concepts of 'inscape' and 'instress' and around Heidegger's reading of both appropriation (Ereignis) and the fourfold (das Geviert). This study will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in both Victorian literature and Continental philosophy.

John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of the comic and repose in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Bryant argues that Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale in order to create his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose." Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements--'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication--a provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed "minor" or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

An exuberant and entertaining biography of Charles Dickens that captures the essence of the great novelist. Simon Callow's sparkling biography explores the central importance of the theatre to the life of the greatest storyteller in the English language. From his early years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth to his reluctant retirement from 'these garish lights' just before his death, Dickens was obsessed with the stage. Not only was he a dazzling mimic who wrote, acted in and stage-managed plays, all with fanatical perfectionism; as a writer he was a compulsive performer, whose very imagination was theatrical, both in terms of plot devices and construction of character. Like many actors, Dickens felt the need to be completed by contact with his audience. He was the original 'celebrity' author, who attracted thousands of adoring fans to his readings in Britain and across the Atlantic, in which he gave voice to his unforgettable cast of characters. In Charles Dickens, Callow brings his own unique insight to a life driven by performance and showmanship. He reveals an exuberant and irrepressible talent, whose 'inimitable' wit and personality crackle off the page.

William Blake's literary works are characterized by a ceaseless dynamics constituted in the fierce interactions of the language, thought, and narrative of his myth. Highlighting the critical problems facing the linear approach that the study of Blake has adopted from the traditional methodology of Newtonian science, Jules van Lieshout argues that nonlinearity is the key to understanding Blake's prophecies. Throughout his discussions, Van Lieshout focuses on the relation of Blake's Generation and Eternity, which he identifies as Bakhtinian 'world views'. In Generation, existence is finalized as a hierarchy of geometric 'dark globes', each assuming the character of universal whole to the exclusion of all others. Eternity, on the other hand, is Blake's fractal 'human form' of existence that is continuously organized and reorganized in the dynamic interaction of whole and parts. Blake represents these world views as interinvolved. Their dynamic interaction reflects and refracts his conceptual thought, mythological narrative, and poetic language. Hence, his visionary epic self-organizes into a self-similar complex system whose patterns of behaviour are not merely remarkably like those that modern applications of nonlinear dynamics are revealing in the physical world, but are indeed inherent in the processes of writing and reading his individual works.

Bringing together a variety of critical approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives, this work reflects the continuing vitality and breadth of George Sand scholarship around the world. It contains twenty-eight papers and a keynote address presented at the Seventh International George Sand Conference. Contributors include leading European, American, and Asian scholars in the field. The volume opens with essays by Henri Peyre and Marilyn French focusing on George Sand's relation to her own period and society and her continuing relevance to modern readers. The next three sections are devoted to an examination of Sand's work in specific genres: the novel, travel writing, and autobiography. Other subject areas addressed include the relation of text to personal ideology, political views, and sexual politics and identity. The remaining chapters explore Sand's relationships with her contemporaries, including Alfred de Musset, Balzac, Flaubert, and Alexandre Dumas fils. Presenting the best in current scholarship in the field, this work will be of interest for studies and courses relating to nineteenth century women writers, French literature, women's studies, cultural and social history, and related subjects.

Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality," as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

What were the consequences of Tolstoy's unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer's family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy's choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of "fate," and aversion to incest.

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

This complete scholarly edition of the poems of Jones Very (1813-80) provides the requisite materials for a major reappraisal of his work and standing among the significant figures of American Transcendentalism. Collecting 862 poems, the volume makes available for the first time all of Very's known poems, including much previously unpublished or uncollected material. Very, a New England Transcendentalist and a protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is one of the underrated American poets of the nineteenth century. Though he attracted a select audience in his day, serious study of Very's work in this century has been hampered by the lack of a complete, convenient, and reliable edition of his poetry. Perhaps even more discouraging to readers of older collections of Very's poems has been the puzzling variance in the style and quality of the verse. This edition, in which the poems are dated and chronologically arranged, reveals the three stages of Very's poetic development, out of which the distinctive genius of the second period clearly emerges. Written under the influence of a powerful psychological/spiritual experience, the ecstatic utterances of this period are by turns breathless in their intensity and tranquil in their serene contentment. This complete edition presents a critical, unmodernized, clear-text version of each poem, reflecting as nearly as possible the author's final intention. A textual introduction outlines editorial procedures and problems, and a general introduction places Very among his contemporaries, discusses the mystical experience that transformed his life and poetry, reviews the major related criticism, and assesses his poetic achievements. Historical notes and a full textual apparatus complete the edition.

In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.

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

Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and 90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context, including the history of Victorian drama; the contexts of criticism in the period; poetry as post-romantic and pre-modernist mode of expression; the uses and subversions of fictional forms in his work; and his subversion of the autobiographical mode in his prison letter De Profundis. This comprehensive and readable introduction offers readers and students a lively and informative guide to Wilde's significance in the context of his own time and his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture.

This study of the literary culture in Britain in the years after Waterloo begins with an account of two fatal duels, the famous duel of 16 February 1821, in which John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, fell, and the less well known duel of 26 March 1822, in which Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer, was killed. These duels, Richard Cronin suggests, bring into sharp focus the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Waterloo. The book ranges widely but at its centre are the three literary phenomena that best define the period: Walter Scott's novels, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It was a culture constituted not by the doctrine of sympathy that its leading writers held in common but by the antagonisms that divided them, a culture in which England vied with Scotland, literary and political principles converged, and there was a volatile relationship between the public and the private. These were the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and literature came to be decisively identified with print rather than with manuscript. Its most prized cultural products were miscellaneous. Superficial, even heartless, responses to the world were valued. Male writers responded aggressively to the threat that literature might be a kind of writing largely consumed by women and increasingly produced by them. This was the culture that writers such as Wordsworth repudiated, but the relationship between the culture that Wordsworth represented and the culture that he opposed, like the relationship between duellists, was at once violently aggressive and mutually supportive: each, as many writers of the period recognized, was dependent on the other.

The concept of culture, now such an important term within both the arts and the sciences, is a legacy of the nineteenth century. By closely analyzing writings by evolutionary scientists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace and Herbert Spencer, alongside those of literary figures including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Butler and Gosse, David Amigoni shows how the modern concept of ???culture??? developed out of the interdisciplinary interactions between literature, philosophy, anthropology, colonialism, and, in particular, Darwin??'s theories of evolution. He goes on to explore the relationship between literature and evolutionary science by arguing that culture was seen less as a singular idea or concept, and more as a field of debate and conflict. This timely and highly original book includes much new material on the history of evolutionary thought and its cultural impact, and will be of interest to scholars of intellectual and scientific history as well as of literature.

This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated identity, personality, or sensibility. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark Andre Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

Writing French Algeria offers a new perspective on the history of French writing in colonial Algeria. It discusses both the Orientalizing texts which followed the conquest of 1830 (by Fromentin, Gautier, Masqueray, and Loti), and the colonialist novelists who sought to depict and influence the birth of a new European race (Bertrand, Randau, and the Algerianists). Finally, it provides fresh readings of key works by the École Alger's foremost writers: Camus, Audisio, and Roblès.

The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The "Reader's Guide" begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally, an annotated guide to further reading.

The repercussions of the French Revolution included erosion of many previously held certainties in Britain, as in the rest of Europe. Even the authority of language as a cornerstone of knowledge was called into question and the founding principles of intellectual disciplines challenged, as Romantic writers developed new ways of expressing their philosophy of the imagination and the human heart. This 2009 book traces the impact of revolution on language, from William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, to William Hazlitt, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. A leading scholar in Romantic literature and theology, John Beer offers a persuasive new account of post-revolutionary continuities between the major Romantic writers and their Victorian successors.

This volume presents for the first time the complete textual history of one of the most famous love letters ever written. Addressed to Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and composed in Reading Gaol, it was later given the title 'De Profundis' by Wilde's friend and literary executor, Robert Ross. It was Ross's severely abridged and sanitized version, published in 1905 and again 1908, which inaugurated the tradition of seeing De Profundis as the apologia pro sua vita of a broken man. This edition takes account of this complex heritage by arguing that Wilde's prison document may be seen not just as the basis of a letter (a typed copy of which may have been sent to Douglas) but also as an unfinished literary work which he intended for public consumption at some future date. Such a case is made by placing in the public domain, often for the first time, a number of different works, derived from different texts, each of which bears witness to Wilde's multiple intentions for his prison document. These texts comprise: the manuscript held in the British Library; the version of Wilde's letter published by his son, Vyvyan Holland, from a typescript bequeathed to him by Robert Ross; hitherto unpublished witnesses to that typescript; and Ross's editions, collated with each other. The commentary to this edition - again for the first time - sets Wilde's story of his own life in 'De Profundis' against the testimony of other players in his drama, including, most importantly, that of Douglas. In so doing it exposes the partial nature of Wilde's narrative, as well as the personal obsessions which animated it. The commentary also demonstrates a hitherto unnoticed element of Wilde's work, the extent and nature of its richly layered intertextuality and its similarity, in its compositional practices, to many of his earlier works.

Matthew Rowlinson proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for a reading of Tennyson. In a series of attentive close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work. Focusing on the poet's most important early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights. The author begins by observing that the subjectivities articulated in these poems, from the strangely passive poet-seer of the ""Armageddon"" fragments to the embowered singers of ""Mariana,"" ""The Lady of Shalott,"" and ""The Hesperides"" to the absconding monarch of ""Ulysses,"" are all constituted in relation to ruined, abandoned, or inaccessible places. The placing of the subject allegorizes its relation to the signifier as well as to the discursive structures within which the signifier comes into being. On this premise, Rowlinson takes up Lacan's claim that it is through the signifier that it is through the signifier that all human desire is mediated. In the placement of the subjects he reads a distinctively Tennysonian articulation of desire. Following Paul de Man, Rowlinson demonstrates that allegory comes into being only with a structure of repetition. He has developed a formalist poetics that provides a psychoanalytic account of the most basic figurative and formal devices - allegory, metaphor, rhyme, and metre - and he offers an explication and critique of major concepts in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, including the gaze, the castration complex, the death drive, and the compulsion to repeat. By returning to the deconstruction, the author has resumed the challenges English studies took up in the 1970s and left incomplete in its rush to historicism. His readings offer fresh insights at the level of theory.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is unquestionably one of the greatest works of world literature. With its dramatic portrayal of a Russian family in crisis and its intense investigation into the essential questions of human existence, the novel has had a major impact on writers and thinkers across a broad range of disciplines, from psychology to religious and political philosophy. This proposed reader's guide has two major goals: to help the reader understand the place of Dostoevsky's novel in Russian and world literature, and to illuminate the writer's compelling and complex artistic vision. The plot of the novel centers on the murder of the patriarch of the Karamazov family and the subsequent attempt to discover which of the brothers bears responsibility for the murder, but Dostoevsky's ultimate interests are far more thought-provoking. Haunted by the question of God's existence, Dostoevsky uses the character of Ivan Karamazov to ask what kind of God would create a world in which innocent children have to suffer, and he hoped that his entire novel would provide the answer. The design of Dostoevsky's work, in which one character poses questions that other characters must try to answer, provides a stimulating basis for reader engagement. Having taught university courses on Dostoevsky's work for over twenty years, Julian W. Connolly draws upon modern and traditional approaches to the novel to produce a reader's guide that stimulate the reader's interest and provides a springboard for further reflection and study.