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.

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.

How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction to the genre. Using examples from the classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victorian novel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing, and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to create serious "art" and to appeal to wide audiences; to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to their own rich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity at full speed.
Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types and explores the cultural and historical developments of the novel form itself. The book also poses a series of "big questions" pertaining to money, capitalism, industry, race, gender, and, at the same time, to formal issues, such as plotting, perspective, and realist representation. In addition, it locates the qualities that give to the great variety of Victorian novels a "family resemblance," the material conditions of their production, their tendency to multiply plots, their obsession with class and money, their problematic handling of gender questions, and their commitment to realist representation.
How to Read the Victorian Novel challenges our comfortable expectations of the genre in order to explore intensively a burgeoning and changing literary form which mirrors a burgeoning and changing society.

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.

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.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader's Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader's guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain's discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid's life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West - and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

Russian Symbolism, a movement at once literary and philosophical, flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unlike other contemporaneous movements that renounced the influence and traditions of the past, the Symbolists sought to integrate themselves with their predecessors, and achieve in both life and art a fundamental unity. By linking poetry, religious thought, music, and the visual arts, and by discovering, reading, and disseminating the work of numerous foreign and indigenous writers, the Symbolists initiated a cultural renaissance in Russia wherein reception became the movement's guiding principle. Michael Wachtel explores here the art and development of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), a poet and theorist who articulated a highly influential concept of Symbolism. The German writers Goethe and Novalis played a central part in Ivanov's vision and were, in his mind, powerful precursors in a proto-Symbolist pantheon. Their work not only influenced his own writing but also, in maintaining the Symbolist creed of unity in art and life, altered his world perspective. Wachtel, in exploring Ivanov's relationship to Goethe and Novalis, illuminates the issues that lie at the core of Symbolism: the theory of the symbol, poetics, poetry as theurgy, the relationship between literary creation and "real life,"and the theory and practice of translation. Ivanov's reception of the Germans, Wachtel asserts, is indicative of the fundamental Symbolist striving for spiritual and artist community, for establishing a seamless tradition. This strain of early twentieth-century thought, whose adherents include Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber, and Ernst Robert Curtis, retains a pervasive potency in scholarly studies today. To understand Ivanov's integrating ideals, then, is to become conversant with a movement that continues to influence our understanding of culture.

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.

This three-volume set brings together a rich collection of primary source materials on flirtation and courtship in the nineteenth-century. Introductory essays and extensive editorial apparatus offer historical and cultural contexts of the materials included Throughout the long nineteenth-century, a woman's life was commonly thought to fall into three discrete developmental stages; personal formation and a gendered education; a young woman's entrance onto the marriage market; and finally her emergence at the apogee of normative femininity as wife and mother. In all three stages of development, there was an unspoken awareness of the duplicity at the heart of this carefully cultivated femininity. What women were taught, no matter their age, was that if you desired anything in life, it behooved you to perform indifference. This meant that for women, the art of flirtation and feigning indifference were viewed as essential survival skills that could guarantee success in life. These three volumes document the many ways in which nineteenth-century women were educated in this seemingly universal wisdom, but just as frequently managed to manipulate, subvert, and navigate their way through such proscribed norms to achieve their own desires. Presenting a wide range of documents from novels, memoirs, literary journals, newspapers, plays, poetry, songs, parlour games, and legal documents, this collection will illuminate a far more diverse set of options available to women in their quest for happiness, and a new understanding of the operations of courtship and flirtation, the "central" concerns of a nineteenth-century woman's life. The volumes will be of interest to scholars of history, literature, gender and cultural studies, with an interest in the nineteenth-century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.

This volume focuses on the literary connotations of the "Channel Packet" and sets forth lively dialogues between French and British culture at a key period of artistic innovation and exchange between "high" and popular art forms.

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.

George Eliot is one of the most important women novelists of the 19th century. Throughout her writings, she explores the interconnectedness of the self and society. This theme of interconnectedness creates the social, psychological, and religious worlds of her fictional communities. Eliot distinguished herself from other Victorian novelists through her realism, her use of an engaging narrator, and her indebtedness to thinkers such as Comte, Mill, and Darwin.

The essays assembled in this book represent the best criticism of Eliot's novels from the 19th century to the present day. The essays are grouped in sections devoted to particular novels, and within each section the essays are arranged chronologically to chart the evolving critical response to her work. An introductory chapter briefly overviews the philosophical influences on Eliot's novels, and a bibliography of selected additional readings concludes the book. The volume summarizes the critical response to Eliot's work and documents changing views toward her novels.

The poetry of Christina Rossetti is often described as 'gothic' and yet this term has rarely been examined in the specific case of Rossetti's work. Based on new readings of the full range of her writings, from 'Goblin Market' to the devotional poems and prose works, this book explores Rossetti's use of Gothic forms and images to consider her as a Gothic writer. Christina Rossetti's Gothic analyses the poet's use of the grotesque and the spectral and the Christian roots and Pre-Raphaelite influences of Rossetti's deployment of Gothic tropes.

This is a book about two empires-America and Rome-and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state-both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire-republicanism and slavery-to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read-and how we might yet read.

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.

Readers have long been enthralled by the novels of Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is considered the first modern detective novel. This book by Tamar Heller--the most comprehensive study of Collins' work ever written--places Collins within Victorian literary history, showing how his fiction transforms the conventions of the traditionally female genre of the Gothic novel and can be read as a critique of the gender and class distinctions that structured Victorian society. Heller offers an insightful account of the ways in which Collins' work in the female Gothic tradition influenced his characteristic themes and imagery. She also explores how this association with the genres of the Gothic and with controversial "sensation fiction" linked Collins with women writers and literary and social marginality during an era when novel writing was increasingly a male-defined and male-dominated profession. Heller argues that Collins' fictions reflect his own contradictory status as a Victorian writer; his novels focus on the relation of the writer to the literary marketplace and also on the intricate and ambivalent dialectic of masculine literary authority and feminine marginality. This study of Collins makes an original contribution to feminist literary criticism by demonstrating its value for the reexamination of an important male writer. In addition, by exploring the complexity of the relationship of a male writer to a feminine literary tradition, the book breaks new ground in the study of literary influence and in critical discussions of the literary canon.

History and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary historysome, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism. Through close readings of texts by Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant 'other', but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and linear past, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls 'romantic presentism' insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience-and hence of ethics and democratic possibility.