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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and anti-materialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes-including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. Author David Dowling's history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his proteges-a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating-is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

"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.

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.

In this introduction to the life and works of John Keats, originally published in 1981, William Walsh presents a comprehensive but approachable study which illuminates first the poems, indirectly the man, and more obliquely the period. Working within a biographical framework, the author looks at Keats from the point of view of the development of his art and sensibility, examining all the major poems and relating them to the letters; reference is made throughout the book to the best contemporary critical writing on the subject and a select bibliography is provided.

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.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form. The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures-in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

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.

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.

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. Great Expectations (1861) is not only one of the last great novels to be written by Dickens but is also one which centres around his primary themes: the importance of childhood in relationship to adult life, concepts of guilt and imprisonment and an analysis of individualism as opposed to the increasing bureaucracy of nineteenth-century England.This guide isan ideal introduction tothe textincluding its contexts, Dickens's style and imagery, its critical reception from the time of publication to the present, a guide to illustrated editions and film adaptations and a guide to further reading.

Art and literature during the European fin-de-siecle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

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

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical study by examining the tensions between generic conventions and the impulses that created and reinforced them. The introduction and opening chapter offer clear and accessible discussions of the social, political, cultural, and literary conditions influencing the slave narrative genre. Subsequent chapters are built on this theoretical framework and present close analytical readings of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass's Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. The volume probingly traces the relationship between rhetorical self-creation and social ideology to show how that relationship was mediated within the fugitive slave narrative genre.

This study should be of interest to the scholar and aficionado alike. It uncovers a thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far reaching use of humour. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the author argues the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of many of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

This is a critical study of the reinscription of biblical parables in Victorian realist fiction. The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and Lazarus and the Rich Man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism - the fiction of the probable and the commonplace - bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. But the Victorian literary engagement with the parable genre was not merely a matter of the useful or telling allusion. Susan E. Colon shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral complacency. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources. This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

In Flaubert: Writing the Masculine Mary Orr offers a new approach to Flaubert's fiction and to the field of gender studies. Close readings of his six major works build towards a much wider picture, in which definitions of the masculine emerge from the complex context of nineteenth-century France and from current debates within gender studies. Various received ideas about Flaubert, his novels, patriarchy, realism, and the primacy of gender over sex are re-evaluated to show a writer aware of the logic and contradictions of male power.

The Life of Our Lord" is a life of Jesus written by Dickens for his children in the 1840s but not published until 1934. This is the first major study to carefully and seriously consider the work and its place in the Dickens corpus. While Dickens' religion and religious thought is recognized as a significant component of his work, no study of Dickens' religion has carefully considered his often ignored, yet crucially relevant, "The Life of Our Lord". Written by a biblical studies scholar, this study brings the insights of a theological approach to bear on "The Life of Our Lord" and on Dickens' other writing. Colledge argues that Dickens intended "The Life Of Our Lord" as a serious and deliberate expression of his religious thought and his understanding of Christianity based on evidences for his reasons for writing, what he reveals, and the unique genre in which he writes. Using "The Life of Our Lord" as a definitive source for our understanding of Dickens' Christian worldview, the book explores Dickens' Christian voice in his fiction, journalism, and letters. As it seeks to situate him in the context of nineteenth-century popular religion - including his interest in Unitarianism - this study presents fresh insight into his churchmanship and reminds us, as Orwell observed, that Dickens 'was always preaching a sermon'.