In this novel interpretation of cultural discourse in Spanish America, Alonso argues that Spanish American cultural production is marked by an internal rhetoric crisis that resulted from the adoption of discourses regarded as "modern" in historical and economic circumstances that are themselves the negation of modernity. Through a reading of texts by Sarmiento, Masilla, Quiroga, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez and others, Alonso identifies the existence of this textual dynamics in works ranging from the 19th century to the present.

Edgar Allen Poe's influence on the twentieth century French writer Paul Valery was profound, much more so than on Baudelaire and Mallarme. This book is the first comprehensive study of Poe's influence of Valery and is based on Valery's own concept of literary influence. Valery discovered in Poe's tales and literary essays a Drama of the intellect that was to inspire his Evening with Monsieur teste, Agathe, and Introduction to the method of Leonardo Da Vinci. Valery's poetics and approach to literary criticism have direct connections to Poe's Philosophy of Composition and Poetic Principle. Valery's only essay devoted to his American mentor, On Poe's Eureka, recognizes the importance of the cosmological poem in Valery's intellectual development. Eureka awakened in him an interest in science and mathematics that lasted a lifetime and inspired him to apply scientific analysis to literary genius, the first writer to place creative work on an analytical basis and explore the psychological aspects of literature.

Describing Jewish representation both by Jews and Gentiles in the British Romantic era, Scrivener integrates popular culture with belletristic writing to explore the wildly varying treatments of stereotypical figures: the pedlar, the moneylender, the Jew's daughter, "la belle juive," the convert, the prophet, the alchemist, and the criminal. This sweeping study finds that pervasive Judaeophobia, reflecting old religious conflicts and new anxieties over modernity, affects but does not wholly determine the discourses that reflect a mix of Jewish and English cultures.

After the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, journalism became a target, a counterpoint, and even a model for many American writers. The first book of its kind, "Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America "explores the sibling rivalry that emerged as Poe, Thoreau, Stowe, and their contemporaries responded to newspapers, defended their own versions of the truth, and crafted "news of their own" in "Walden," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and other works. This historical study provides fresh insights into the antebellum era while informing the current debate over stories and truths in the age of blogs, internet news, and reality television.

In the wake of psychoanalysis and the birth of therapy, trauma is a powerful concept in twenty-first century culture. Thomas J. Brennan, S.J. finds roots of the "sensibility of trauma" by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses--the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.

Investigating a transatlantic culture that flourished in Great Britain and North America between 1750 and 1850, this 2009 collection explains how complex relationships between Britons, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans shaped the literature and history of the age. This shaping role has all too often been ignored or misconstrued by literary critics and historians. The book's chapters examine literary texts, travel accounts, traders' memoirs, historical documents, captivity narratives, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and visual arts. Its contributors chart the rise and fall of mixed communities living on the margins of white and Indian settlements, examining the role of 'cultural brokers' who used their expertise in both white and Indian cultures to mediate between them.

Turgenev is in many ways the most enigmatic of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. A realist, he was nevertheless drawn towards symbolism and the supernatural in his later career. Renowned for his authentic depictions of Russian life, he spent long periods in Europe and was more Western in outlook than many of his contemporaries. Though he stood aloof from politics, the major political issues of nineteenth-century Russia are central to his fiction. Interest in Turgenev remains strong in the twenty-first century, sustained by the amenability of his work to contemporary critical approaches and also by a recognition of the continuing relevance of his perspective on the perennial complexities of Russia's relations with Europe. This volume provides ample evidence of this interest. The chapters which comprise it are written by specialists on the writer and cover many aspects of Turgenev's creativity from his artistic method to such issues as the Jewish Question and Europe. It also examines his cultural legacy - in film and recent popular re-writes of his novels - as well as his influence on writers as diverse as Rozanov and Robert Dessaix. This work will be of interest to students, postgraduates and specialists in the field of Russian literary culture.

"The multidisciplinary aesthetics of Walter Pater, the nineteenth century's most provocative critic, are explored by an international team of scholars. True aesthetic criticism takes place working across the arts, Pater insists: acknowledging the differences between media, but seeking possibilities of interconnection"--

Ibsen and the Irish Revival examines Henrik Ibsen's influence on the Irish Revival and the reception of his plays in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Dublin. It highlights the international dimension of the Irish Literary Revival and offers new perspectives on W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, James Joyce, George Moore and Sean O'Casey.

This valuable compilation of articles offers original, historical, biographical and literary perspectives on the works of Stendhal. Eleven essays plunge the reader into Stendhal's mythological universe, providing new insights into the network of symbols, images and obsessional themes that run through his works. This multi-faceted collection examines Stendhal as the problematic subject for a biography, as autobiographer in his own right, as journalist, novelist, and innovator in the realm of fictional devices, and as the great representative of that literature of ideas first acclaimed by Balzac. Topics addressed include the writer's own enigmatic persona, his autobiographical writings, his encounter with George Sand, and his journalistic career in Italy, as well as the structure imposed on his novels by an Oedipal conflict he himself perceives in pre-Freudian terms, his experiments with multiple narrative point of view, and a feminist perspective on his use of the epistolary form as a device to enhance the plot.

This book investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts.

When Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, friends and admirers remembered him as an eccentric man whose outer life was continuously fed by deeper spiritual currents. But scholars have since focused almost exclusively on Thoreau's literary, political, and scientific contributions. This book offers the first in-depth study of Thoreau's religious thought and experience. In it Alan D. Hodder recovers the lost spiritual dimension of the writer's life, revealing a deeply religious man who, despite his rejection of organized religion, possessed a rich inner life, characterized by a sort of personal, experiential, nature-centered, and eclectic spirituality that finds wider expression in America today. At the heart of Thoreau's life were episodes of exhilaration in nature that he commonly referred to as his ecstasies. Hodder explores these representations of ecstasy throughout Thoreau's writings-from the riverside reflections of his first book through Walden and the later journals, when he conceived his journal writing as a spiritual discipline in itself and a kind of forum in which to cultivate experiences of contemplative non-attachment. In doing so, Hodder restores to our understanding the deeper spiritual dimension of Thoreau's life to which his writings everywhere bear witness.

"Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre" brings a fresh perspective to the study of Sweden's great playwright. August Strindberg (1849-1912) anticipated most of the major developments in European theatre over the last century. As such he is well-placed to provide perspectives on the current burgeoning interest in sacred theatre. The religious crises of the 19th Century provoked in Strindberg both sharp scepticism about claims to religious authority and a visionary search for truth. Against the backdrop of a major change in European culture this book traces the emergence in some of Strindberg's late plays of a proto-sacred-theatre. It argues that Strindberg faced the alternatives of a contentless transcendent abyss, threatening the extinction of his ego, or a retreat into conservative theism, reducing him to slavish submission to the commandments and rule of an external father-God. Weaving together theatrical, aesthetic, and theological voices, this book investigates the relationship of the sacred to subjectivity and its implications for Strindberg's dramaturgy. In doing so it always keeps in view the sense both of loss and opportunity engendered by a turning point in the western experience of the sacred.

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to "proper" behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women--however virtuous--are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints ofdomesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.

The essays in Yeats Annual No 7 are dedicated to the memory of Richard Ellmann, one of the great pioneer critics of W.B.Yeats. They have been contributed by distinguished colleagues and friends of Richard Ellmann, chosen on his advice. The volume also contains much new material by Yeats himself - a new and virtually complete early draft of his novel The Speckled Bird, here entitled 'The Lilies of the Lord' and two new poems from The Flame of the Spirit manuscript book, given to Maud Gonne in 1981.

A true tour de force, this book documents the transformation of one Indian literature, Tamil, under the impact of colonialism and Western modernity. Ebeling tackles a host of issues pertinent to Tamil elite literary production and consumption during the 19th century.

"This dictionary brings together in one volume information on Byron's work, life and times. Areas covered include his poetry and prose; authors and works known to him; genres, forms, styles; his life, biographers and incarnations on stage and screen; manuscripts and editions; historical, social and cultural contexts; and his influence on other art"--Provided by publisher.

Paying attention to the historically specific dimensions of objects such as the photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection, the contributors to this volume offer new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century practices of reading, viewing, and collecting, revealing new readings of Wordsworth, Shelley, James and Wilde, among others.

The Victorians, having once been seen as 'them', the age responsible for the mistakes of the past, were transformed by the new theatrical forms of the 1960s into 'us', a metaphor for what the nation thinks (and fears) about itself. And, since the 1980s and the rise of new biographical forms in the theatre, the emphasis has shifted further, from 'we' to 'me': plays about individuals, great and small, and their struggles for personal validation. This study argues powerfully that the stage portrayal of the Victorians in recent times is a key reference point in understanding notions of Britishness, heritage and nostalgia, and the profound politicisation of national identity over the last four decades. Using many examples drawn from theatre archives, and throwing new light on works by canonical playwrights like Bond, Edgar, and Churchill, it charts the decline in class-based narratives of the British people and the move towards plays reflecting a more atomised, individuated society, preoccupied with identity and the past but no longer able to provide a convincing account of itself as a nation.

How is Hardy's development of thematics and characters matched by that of narrative techniques and his handling of time? This book uses narratological methods to stress the interdependence of content and expression in a key transitional writer between the Victorian and Modernist eras.

This the first sustained study of the interest of John Ruskin in the theatre of his time. It examines Ruskin's active engagement with and influence on the Victorian popular theatre. Ruskin was an enthusiastic and catholic theatre-goer, enjoying pantomime as much as Shakespeare. Through the lens of Ruskin's discussions of pantomime, melodrama, Shakespearean tragedy, and painting and the stage, Newey and Richards offer a new view of the late Victorian stage focusing on London's West End in its heyday.

"An ambitious study, the fruit of sustained work over many years. Professor Carter's book deploys a stunning knowledge of Proust and places Carter among the first line of Proust scholars in the country."
--Roger Shattuck, Boston University

"The Proustian Quest" is the first full-length study that explores the influence of social change on Proust's vision. "In Remembrance of Things Past," Proust describes how the machines of transportation and communication transformed fashion, social mores, time-space perception, and the understanding of the laws of nature. Concentrating on the motif of speed, Carter establishes the centrality of the modern world to the novel's main themes and produces a far- reaching synthesis that demonstrates the work's profound structural unity.

This book studies literary epiphany as a modality of character in the British and American novel. Epiphany presents a significant alternative to traditional models of linking the eye, the mind, and subject formation, an alternative that consistently attracts the language of spirituality, even in anti-supernatural texts. This book analyzes how these epiphanies become "spiritual" and how both character and narrative shape themselves like constellations around such moments. This study begins with James Joyce, 'inventor' of literary epiphany, and Martin Heidegger, who used the ancient Greek concepts behind 'epiphaneia' to re-define the concept of Being. Kim then offers readings of novels by Susan Warner, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, each addressing a different form of epiphany.