Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.

The Irish Theatre in Transition explores the ever-changing Irish Theatre from its inception to its vibrant modern-day reality. This book shows some of the myriad forms of transition and how Irish theatre reflects the changing conditions of a changing society and nation.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.

This study focuses on how Frankenstein works: how the story is told and why it is so rich and gripping. Part I uses carefully selected short extracts for close textual analysis, while Part II examines Shelley's life, the historical and literary contexts of the novel, and offers a sample of key criticism.

Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in a feature of political anti-slavery discourse the condemnation of an enfeebled North the key to a wide variety of literary works of the 1850s. Both the political discourse and the literature set out to expose the self-chosen degradation of compromise as a threat at once to the personal foundation of each individual Northerner and to the survival of the people as an actor in history. The book fills a gap in literary criticism of the period, which has primarily focused on abolitionist discourse when relating anti-slavery thought to the literature of the decade. Though it owed a debt to the abolitionists, political anti-slavery discourse took on the more focused mission of offering a challenge to the people. Would the North submit to the version of self-discipline demanded by the Slave Power s Northern minions, or would it tap the energy of the nation s founding until it embodied defiance in its very constitution? Would the North remain a type for the future slave empire it could not prevent, or would it prophesy national freedom in the simple recovery of its own agency? Literary works in both poetry and prose were well suited to making this political challenge bear its full weight on the nation fleshing out the critique through narrative crises that brought home the personal stake each Northerner held in what George Julian called an exodus from the bondage of compromise. By the end of 1860 this exodus had been completed, and that accomplishment owed much to the massive ten year cultural project to expose the slavery-accommodating definition of nationality as a threat to the republican selfhood of each Northerner. Stowe, Whittier, Willis, and Whitman, among others, devoted their literary works to this project."

From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green s cultural study reveals the role of "Mountain Whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia s essential role in shaping America s understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South.

Tony Pastor, a vaudeville performer and manager, was known as the Dean of Vaudeville. He is credited with cleaning up the bawdy variety shows of the mid 1800s, resulting in their appeal to women and the middle classes. He opened his first vaudeville house in 1865 and continued to present shows at a series of New York houses until shortly before his death in 1908. He achieved his greatest hits with parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, but he also presented parodies, or burlesques, of Shakespearean productions and those of contemporary authors, as well as melodramatic works in the popular style of the day. The plays, or afterpieces, and the function they served for both the audience and the theatre, are examined within the context of the culture and conditions under which the plays were written. Thirteen plays are included, each preceded by a production history. Issues addressed in each play are analyzed, such as prevailing societal attitudes, including those toward class and gender. Discourse on the parodies includes an examination of the original play, detailing the reasons why particular sections were chosen to parody.

This examination of Tony Pastor's scripts will appeal to theatre scholars, especially those interested in vaudeville, since until recently the plays were mostly kept in private collections. Students of American culture, particularly culture at the turn of the century, will find valuable material in the plays as they shed light on the daily life of the lower and middle classes, and subsequently on the issues that concerned them. Since the plays were formerly not widely available, this study, including the texts of the original scripts, provides a valuable resource to scholars as well as to those with a general interest in the theatre and vaudeville.

The Gothic Wanderer Rises Eternal in Popular Literature
From the horrors of sixteenth century Italian castles to twenty-first century plagues, from the French Revolution to the liberation of Libya, Tyler R. Tichelaar takes readers on far more than a journey through literary history. The Gothic Wanderer is an exploration of man's deepest fears, his eff orts to rise above them for the last two centuries, and how he may be on the brink finally of succeeding.
Tichelaar examines the figure of the Gothic wanderer in such well-known Gothic novels as "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "Frankenstein," and "Dracula," as well as lesser known works like Fanny Burney's "The Wanderer," Mary Shelley's "The Last Man," and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Zanoni." He also finds surprising Gothic elements in classics like Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes." From Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" to Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Tichelaar explores a literary tradition whose characters refl ect our greatest fears and deepest hopes. Readers will find here the revelation that not only are we all Gothic wanderers--but we are so only by our own choosing.
Acclaim for "The Gothic Wanderer"
""The Gothic Wanderer" shows us the importance of its title figure in helping us to see our own imperfections and our own sometimes contradictory yearnings to be both unique and yet a part of a society. The reader is in for an insightful treat."
--Diana DeLuca, Ph.D. and author of Extraordinary Things
"Make no mistake about it, The Gothic Wanderer is an important, well researched and comprehensive treatise on some of the world's finest literature."
--Michael Willey, author of Ojisan Zanoni
About the Author
Tyler R. Tichelaar holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Western Michigan University. He has lectured on writing and literature at Clemson University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of London. Tichelaar is the author of numerous historical novels, including The Marquette Trilogy (composed of Iron Pioneers, The Queen City, and Superior Heritage) the award-winning Narrow Lives, and Spirit of the North: a paranormal romance. His other scholarly works include King Arthur's Children: a Study in Fiction and Tradition
Foreword by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Ph.D.
Learn more at www.GothicWanderer.com
From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com
Literary Criticism: Gothing & Romance
Literary Criticism: European - General

While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book Uncle Tom's Cabin spurred on abolotionist sentiments in the North, not many are aware of the vast abolitionist literature of children's books, poems, short stories, and essays. Many of these volumes were not written by seasoned authors, but by women whose primary roles were as mothers who functioned as domestic abolitionists, and have been lost to the ages. Here, De Rosa recovers a collection of these writings, illustrating the domestic abolitionists' efforts While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book Uncle Tom's Cabin spurred on abolitionist sentiments in the North, not many are aware of the fast abolitionist literature of children's books, poems, short stories, and essays. Many of these volumes were written by domestic women, not seasoned authors, and have been lost to the ages. Here, De Rosa recovers a collection of these writings, illustrating the domestic abolitionists' efforts when cultural imperatives demanded women's silence. These women asserted their anti-slavery sentiments through the voices of victims (slave children and mothers), white mother-historians, and abolitionist children in juvenile literature, one of the few genres available to female authors of the period. This collection restores the voices of these little known authors and shows how their voices helped to influence children and adults of the period. For women struggling to find a voice in the abolitionist movement while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, domestic abolitionists maintained their identities as exemplary mother-educators, preserved their claims to femininity,and simultaneously entered the public arena. By adapting literary strategies popular in nineteenth-century juvenile narratives, domestic novels, and slave narratives to document slavery's violation of religious, economic, and political principles, these women spoke out against and institution that stood in marked contrast to the beliefs they held so dear. This anthology aims to fill the important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender and illustrates the limitations of a canon that excludes such voices.

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on intertextual transactions in classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1992 and 2005. The book opens with a theoretical essay and proceeds with individual analyses of the interrelatedness, overlappings, entanglements, and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Paul Auster and Herman Melville - Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton and Thomas Pynchon - Donald Barthelme and James Joyce - James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino. The chapters lend themselves to being read in any order, selectively, and in isolation. Given a literal perspective by incongruity, however, the Joycean premise of the book is that a commodius vicus of recirculation (type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward) may bring the reader in any case (back) to the beginning.

This new volume in the "Literary Lives" series focuses on the career of the popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and provides a new account of his professional life in the literary world of nineteenth-century Britain. It draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors, taking in Collins's notoriously complicated private life and his friendship with Charles Dickens, as well his work as journalist, reviewer and playwright. New insights are given into the international dimensions of Collins's career. There is discussion of Collins's best-known novels, including "The Woman in White," "The Moonstone" and "Armadale," but attention is also given to lesser-known works and to Collins's plays, which have long been neglected. The volume will appeal to all students of Wilkie Collins and also to those interested in the literary world of Victorian Britain and the social and business networks which lay at its heart.

This groundbreaking collection of essays represents Herman Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Contributors offer original and provocative readings that span Melville's career and engage the resurgence of interest among literary scholars in aesthetics. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

Victorian writer Frances Trollope has largely been relegated to a mere footnote in literary history as simply the mother of Anthony. Equally unfortunate is that, aside from her nonfiction work "Domestic Manners of the Americans," her 34 novels have been out of print since the nineteenth century. She was, nonetheless, the most provocative female writer of the early Victorian period who used the novel to impel social change. She has been credited for writing the first anti-slavery novel that predates "Uncle ToM's Cabin," along with a number of works that incited reform legislation regarding bastardy clauses, poor laws, and labor conditions.

Expert contributors examine her life and writings, her social activism, and the impact of her works. The book includes discussions of her influence on Anthony Trollope, the rivalry between Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, her belief in the power of female friendship, her ambivalence toward the ability of women to effect social change, her thoughts on Evangelicalism, her views on women and aging, and her innovative contribution to early crime fiction. Contributors argue for the value of reprinting her novels and travel books and point to her enduring literary legacy.

A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction. Featuring contributions from distinguished and emergent Conrad scholars, it unpacks the transformative meanings which Conrad's narratives have achieved in crossing national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring studies on the reception of Conrad in modern China, an exploration of Conrad's relationship with India, a comparative study of the hybrid art of Conrad and Salman Rushdie, and the responses of Conrad's narratives to alternative media forms, this volume brings out transtextual relations among Conrad's works and various media forms, world narratives, philosophies, and emergent modes of critical inquiry. Gathering essays by contributors from Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this volume constitutes an inclusive, transnational networking of emergent border-crossing scholarship.

This study shows how poets worked within and against the available forms of nature writing to challenge their place within physical, political, and cultural landscapes. Looking at the treatment of different ecosystems, it argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions.

Romanticism and the City explores how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature conceptualized urban space. Fresh readings of key texts show how Romantic concerns with urban life shaped both individual works and broad theoretical issues in European Romanticism at large.

Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott's nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply downwards in the twentieth century. Austen's popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott's, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors' own time. To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher's relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors their uninterrupted loyalty. The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism, Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural history.

Criticism has traditionally fixed Austen's "oeuvre" within the ideological locus of the 1790s, ignoring the more topical attributes that her novels display. Such accounts have consequently neglected the complex engagements that took place between Austen's fiction and early nineteenth-century fiction. Informed by a macrocosmic sense of the Romantic-era novel market and a microcosmic analysis of intertexual dynamics, "Jane Austen and the Popular Novel" provides a fresh and alternative perspective on the mature fiction of Jane Austen.

Women in the nineteenth century wrote--prolifically and memorably. The original and provocative essays in this collection address a variety of aspects of the life and literature of nineteenth-century writers of distinction, who happened to be women and sometimes wrote from a women's point of view, but who always reflected the world in which they lived. The majority of the contributions are devoted to detailed analysis of the themes in the literature itself, primarily in the areas of intellectual conditioning, male-female relationships, social imperatives, and spiritual questions. The collection as a whole provides a framework for twentieth-century readers so that they may draw instructive conclusions about women's lives in the previous century.

Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Helene Cixous, Alfonso Cuaron, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.