Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in Darkness engages Twain's best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as his lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the allegorical tale "A Fable of the Yellow Terror" and the yellow face play Ah Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) was a creation of the Congress of Vienna, where the map of Europe was redrawn following Napoleon's defeat. Dutch language and literature were considered the essential tools to smoothly fuse the North and South - today, the Netherlands and Belgium respectively. King Willem I tried a variety of measures to stimulate and control literary life in the South, in an effort to encourage unity throughout his kingdom. Janneke Weijermars describes the driving force of this policy and especially its impact in the South. For some authors, Northern Dutch literature represented the standard to which they aspired. For others, unification triggered a desire to assert their own cultural identity. The quarrels, mutual misunderstandings and subsequent polemics were closely intertwined with political issues of the day. Stepbrothers views the history of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands through a literary lens.

Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, this study brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato.

The impact of the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms. In this scholarly new study, Melissa Fegan explores the Famine's legacy to literature, tracing it down to 1919. Dr Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, and provides a strong historical framework for the understanding of the contemporary Irish mentality.

Taking into account the latest criticism, this book argues that Hardy seems contemporary with D.H. Lawrence in his insights into the unconscious and sexuality, and has been the model for the contemporary reaction against modernist poetry. The book goes on to say that Hardy reversed his usual emphasis on sexuality in The Mayor of Casterbridge and his last novel, The Well-Beloved.

Charles Dickens was the most prominent author of the Victorian era and his work continues to influence and inspire contemporary writers today. Dickens wanted to inform the masses of the troubles encountered in everyday Victorian life, his purpose was to use his novels as a catalyst for social reform. When he died at just fifty eight, mourners left bouquets in their thousands. Among the more extravagant bouquets were wildflowers wrapped in rags - a homage to his humble beginnings. His novels: The Pickwick Papers (1836), Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Dombey and Son (1846), David Copperfield (1849), Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860), Our Mutual Friend (1864), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). This publication profiles the man behind the pen, in words and pictures.

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'.

The first study of George Sand and vision, this book considers the pull between the visual and the visionary in nineteenth-century France through an examination of Sand's novels. With an extensive corpus ranging from Sand's early texts through to her later, less familiar works, it repositions Sand's oeuvre alongside that of the major realist authors and demonstrates her distinctive understanding of the novel as a combination of the concrete and the abstract. By studying Sand's engagement with visual models associated with realism-the mirror, the model of painting, and the scientific gaze-this book proposes a more sustained dialogue between Sand's work and realism than has hitherto been acknowledged, but argues that Sand radically reworks these models to depict a dynamic, mysterious and ever-changing world. Whereas Sand has been read as an author bypassing reality in favour of the ideal, this study shows that she is committed to physical observation, but that she consistently ties this process with the conceptual and the visionary. The book breaks new ground in particular by examining Sand's literary engagement with the visual arts, and it also offers the first sustained consideration of Sand as a scientific writer. By examining Sand's oeuvre from the perspective of vision, this study not only reassesses Sand's writing practice, but also rethinks the relations between the visual and the novel in this period. More specifically, it argues that Sand's work challenges our means of theorizing these relations. In her rejection of binaries and her syncretic understanding of vision, Sand breaks conventional categories and writes novels that are at once realist, visionary, mystical and scientific.

Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes is a collection of essays that reflect on how the literature of the Victorian era engaged with new ways of thinking about time. These essays examine how Victorian fiction registers the psychological adjustment involved in keeping pace with industrial time as time-saving technologies aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time. Examining canonical realist novels, popular literature and science fiction, these essays reveal an often ambivalent and complex response to the onset of "industrial time" and the birth of a modern time-consciousness. Documenting the era's literary responses to the impact and rate of industrial progress and the potentialities of technology these essays trace the Victorians' radical shift in time perception from industrial novels at the onset of industrialization through to fin de siecle narratives of dystopia and apocalypse.

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.

This is a fascinating examination of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work and through that a re-examination of the relation between war and literature. "Derrida, Literature and War" argues for the importance of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work in thinking today about war and literature. Sean Gaston starts by marking Derrida's attempts to resist the philosophical tradition of calculating on absence as an assured resource, while insisting on the (mis)chances of the chance encounter. Gaston re-examines the relation between the concept of war and the chances of literature by focusing on narratives of conflict set during the Napoleonic wars. These chance encounters or duels can help us think again about the sovereign attempt to leave the enemy nameless or to name what cannot be named in the midst of wars without end. His study includes new readings of a range of writers, including Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Clausewitz, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Conrad, Freud, Heidegger, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben. Offering an authoritative reading of Derrida's oeuvre and new insights into a range of writers in philosophy and literature, this is a timely and ambitious study of philosophy, literature, politics and ethics. "The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory" series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today.

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Winner of the 2006 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary Studies, presented by the Western Literature Association

"Offers an eloquent and compelling account of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural production--one that resituates Mexicanos at the center of thinking about U.S. nation-making during the nineteenth century and beyond. . . . This stunning new text promises to reshape literary and theoretical work in American Studies."
--Mary Pat Brady, author of "Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographics: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space"

"Discussions of Latino cultural citizenship and public culture have a distinguished and stimulating lineage in the work of major figures such as Renato Rosaldo, Rina Benmayour, and William Flores. With his new book that introduces literary history into the discussion, we must now add the name of John-Michael Rivera." --JosA(c) E. LimA3n, author of "American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture"

In The Emergence of Mexican America, John-Michael Rivera examines the cultural, political, and legal representations of Mexican Americans and the development of US capitalism and nationhood. Beginning with the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and continuing through the period of mass repatriation of US Mexican laborers in 1939, Rivera examines both Mexican-American and Anglo-American cultural production in order to tease out the complexities of the so-called "Mexican question." Using historical and archival materials, Rivera's wide-ranging objects of inquiry include fiction, non-fiction, essays, treaties, legal materials, politicalspeeches, magazines, articles, cartoons, and advertisements created by both Mexicans and Anglo Americans. Engaging and methodologically venturesome, Rivera's study is a crucial contribution to Chicano/Latino Studies and fields of cultural studies, history, government, anthropology, and literary studies.

Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle, the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

The Irish New Woman explores the textual and ideological connections between feminist, nationalist and anti-imperialist writing and political activism at the fin de siecle. From the 1880s on, the 'Irish Question' was a central site of struggle in British and Irish public discourse, and in this turbulent period a new generation of Irish literary writers began to resist hegemonies of a different kind, subverting gender and sexual identities and challenging prescribed roles in the family. This important new book is the first in-depth study which foregrounds the Irish and New Woman contexts, effecting a paradigm shift in the critical reception of fin de siecle writers and their work.

This study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling, fantastical, and utopian site of romance and subsequent satire for five middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Examining their dreams and experiences and the writing produced from their travels, chapters illuminate how contact with England's opposite and mirror produced literary studies of motion, distance, inversion, primitivism, and travels in time and space, foregrounding the empire's instrumental shaping of literary form, challenging realism with romance and gesturing towards science fiction and modernism.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This text answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

Elizabeth Gaskell's work and life are being rediscovered against a backdrop of Victorian middle-class women's experience by many feminist scholars. Viewed in this century as conventional and conservative, Gaskell may instead be regarded as a radical for her time, because she challenged widely-held assumptions about the nature of women, their proper sphere, and their participation in the public realm. Examining the theme of work in Gaskell's novels, Colby presents this Victorian novelist as an effective advocate of change as she tried to create space for women within the world of work.

A collection of ten original essays forging new interdisciplinary connections between crime fiction and film, encompassing British, Swedish, American and Canadian contexts. The authors explore representations of race, gender, sexuality and memory, and challenge traditional categorisations of academic and professional crime writing.

Wilkie Collins is the only leading Victorian novelist whose letters have not been published. This two-volume edition, edited by William Baker and William Clarke, fills a gaping hole in any assessment of one of the nineteenth century's most loved novelists. It is also extremely timely. Two recent biographies have re-assessed his private life and his literary achievements. His best-known novels, The Women in White and The Moonstone , continue to feature on television, and most of his thirty-odd novels are still in print. This authorised edition reproduces his selection of around 700 key letters of the 2,000 known to be in existence, some recently discovered. Summaries and sources of the remaining letters are provided in an appendix.

Les dix-sept regards sur les " spectateurs " reunis dans le present volume s'inscrivent dans un projet de recherche de longue haleine sur l'essai periodique en Europe. Le recueil prolonge la publication de plusieurs volumes dans notre collection sur les " Lumieres " et la mise en place d'une base de donnees, tous consacres aux " spectateurs " de langues romanes. A la difference de ces derniers, il envisage cependant non seulement les " spectateurs " francais, italiens ou espagnols mais aussi des periodiques anglophones, russes ou germanophones. En elargissant ainsi la perspective, cet ouvrage espere mieux prendre en compte le rayonnement des " spectateurs " a l'echelle mondiale. Et il tente en particulier de donner quelques elements de reponse a une question essentielle : quelles sont les raisons qui ont permis a ces journaux, un siecle durant, et d'un bout du monde a l'autre, de connaitre un succes sans precedent dans l'histoire de la presse litteraire ? Ce livre contient des contributions en francais, allemand, italien, espagnol et anglais.

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce "female moral art," writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme. Papke begins with a brief examination of the ideology of true womanhood, which, she argues, permeates Chopin's and Wharton's fiction and world views. The remainder of her work offers an ideological reading of their social fiction in which their characters search for states of liminality, where they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy. Repeatedly, Papke argues, these states of liminality are literally encoded into images of characters positioned on the edge of an abyss that then becomes a repository of multiple meanings. The author presents Chopin's and Wharton's female discourse as radical art because it dares to defy that which is both alienating and destructive. Papke's provocative analysis will be of interest not only to Wharton and Chopin scholars, but also to those working in the fields of feminist and women's studies. It will also interest scholars and students of American studies, particularly those working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.