This book, first published in 1988, reveals the great care Dickens took with the planning and preparation of A Tale of Two Cities and its roots. It also explores the aspects of Dickens's life, especially his interest in private theatricals, which contributed to the genesis of the novel. For the first time the historical sources for the very individual account of the French Revolution presented in A Tale of Two Cities are examined, and the book investigates the novelist's debt to French and English eye-witnesses. This Companion identifies the multitude of allusions to what Dickens often regarded as the whims of eighteenth-century justice, religion, philosophy, fashion and society. It provides the modern reader with both fundamental sources of information and a fascinating account of the creation of a complex historical novel.

Deeply involved with Irish culture and history, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest poets writing in the last two centuries. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook provides essential help for readers who wish to learn more about his powerful, haunting poems.
Considering Yeats's early, dreamily evocative poems as well as his passionate, tension-ridden later work, Michael O'Neill offers a refreshingly clear discussion of:
*contexts - through an invaluable, accessible overview, a detailed chronology and contemporary documents revealing Yeats's understanding of his vocation as a poet;
*interpretations - through helpfully introduced extracts from criticism of Yeats's work, ranging from early responses through to modern critical texts;
*key poems - in a section where insightful commentary accompanies the full annotated text of many of Yeats's major poems;
*further reading - to guide those interested in additional study.
The Sourcebook is ideal for those new to Yeats's poetry or those who wish to look deeper into its workings, its reception and the contexts from which it emerged.

This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville's concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the 'meaning' of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville's work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian's guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.

Through the novels of England's foremost woman writer, we explore the Regency world at the time of the Napoleonic wars, its manners, fashion and style, pastimes and entertainments. Jane Austen - loved now by a huge audience, thanks partly to modern-day TV and film - led a quiet, uneventful life - yet lived amid great events, in a society viewed with remarkable wit and perception. Here are the places Austen knew, visited and featured in her books: the settings for balls, country strolls, holiday tours, carriage drives, walks, picnics, rendezvous and revelations. The guide includes evocative quotations, surprising facts and places to visit.

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves or their cultural backgrounds, the hotel could provide exhilarating moments of self-discovery or dangerous feelings of alienation. It could prove liberating to the tourist seeking an escape from prescribed gender roles or social class constructs. The book addresses changing notions of nationality, social class, and gender in a variety of expansive or oppressive hotel milieu: in the private space of the hotel room and in the public spaces (foyers, parlors, dining areas). Sections address topics including nationalism and imperialism; the mundane vs. the supernatural; comfort and capitalist excess; assignations, trysts, and memorable encounters in hotels; and women's travels. The book also offers a brief history of inns and hotels of the time period, emphasizing how hotels play a large role in literary texts, where they frequently reflect order and disorder in a personal and/or national context. This collection will appeal to scholars in literature, travel writing, history, cultural studies, and transnational studies, and to those with interest in travel and tourism, hospitality, and domesticity.

This book makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of childhood studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture by drawing on the intersecting fields of girlhood, evangelicalism, and reform to investigate texts written in North America about girls, for girls, and by girls. Responding both to the intellectual excitement generated by the rise of girlhood studies, as well as to the call by recent scholars to recognize the significance of religion as a meaningful category in the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture, this collection locates evangelicalism at the center of its inquiry into girlhood. Contributors draw on a wide range of texts, including canonical literature by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and overlooked archives such as US Methodist Sunday School fiction, children's missionary periodicals, and the Christian Recorder, the flagship newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. These essays investigate representations of girlhood that engage, codify, and critique normative Protestant constructions of girlhood. Contributors examine girlhood in the context of reform, revealing the ways in which Protestantism at once constrained and enabled female agency. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives, including African American Studies, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Material Culture Studies, this volume enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century childhood by focusing on the particularities of girlhood, expanding it beyond that of the white able-bodied middle-class girl and attending to the intersectionality of identity and religion.

Taking its cue from Baudelaire's important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds-both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual-which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space and time. He entered easily and wholly into other countries, other cultures, other national literatures, other periods, other mythologies, other religions, other disciplines, and other modes of representation, and was able to fully inhabit and navigate them, quickly apprehending the conventions by which they operate. The fourteen essays in this volume offer fresh critical-theoretical and historical perspectives not just on key connections and aspects of Wilde's oeuvre itself, but on the development of Wilde's remarkable worldliness in dialogue with many other worlds: contemporary developments in art, science and culture, as well as with other national literatures and cultures. Perhaps as a direct result of this cosmopolitan spirit, Wilde and Wilde's works have been taken up across the globe, as the essays on Wilde's reception in India, Japan and Hollywood illustrate. Many of the essays gathered here are based on groundbreaking archival research, including some never-seen-before illustrations. Together, they have the potential to open up important new comparative, transnational, and historical perspectives on Wilde that can shape and sharpen our future understanding of his work and impact.

This volume aims to introduce undergraduates, graduates, and general readers to the diversity and richness of Canadian short story writing and to the narrative potential of short fiction in general. Addressing a wide spectrum of forms and themes, the book will familiarise readers with the development and cultural significance of Canadian short fiction from the early 19th century to the present. A strong focus will be on the rich reservoir of short fiction produced in the past four decades and the way in which it has responded to the anxieties and crises of our time. Drawing on current critical debates, each chapter will highlight the interrelations between Canadian short fiction and historical and socio-cultural developments. Case studies will zoom in on specific thematic or aesthetic issues in an exemplary manner. The Routledge Introduction to the Canadian Short Story will provide an accessible and comprehensive overview ideal for students and general readers interested in the multifaceted and thriving medium of the short story in Canada.

Extending the work of The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, this volume provides a critical introduction and case studies that illustrate cutting-edge approaches to periodicals research, as well as an overview of recent developments in the field. The twelve chapters model diverse approaches and methodologies for research on nineteenth-century periodicals. Each case study is contextualized within one of the following broad areas of research: single periodicals, individual journalists, gender issues, periodical networks, genre, the relationship between periodicals, transnational/transatlantic connections, technologies of printing and illustration, links within a single periodical, topical subjects, science and periodicals, and imperialism and periodicals. Contributors incorporate first-person accounts of how they conducted their research and provide specific examples of how they gained access to primary sources, as well as the methods they used to analyze the materials. The 2018 winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize. The Committee describes the focus of the book on methodology and case studies as "fresh and original," and "useful for both experienced scholars and those new to the field." "Overall. Case Studies suggests new ways of reading canonical authors, new unerstandings of the interprentation of the personal and the public, and an admirable energy in engaging with the structures of national and transnational periodical discourses that are clearly implicated in maintaining soft power within societies" -- Brian Maidment, Liverpool John Moores University

Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore's music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore's importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing- as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.

The act of writing is intimately bound up with the flow and eddy of a writer's being-within-the-world; the everyday practices, encounters and networks of social life. Exploring the geographies of literary practice in the period 1840-1910, this book takes as its focus the work, or craft, of authorship, exploring novels not as objects awaiting interpretation, but as spatial processes of making meaning. As such, it is interested in literary creation not only as something that takes place - the situated nature of putting pen to paper - but simultaneously as a process that escapes such placing. Arguing that writing is a process of longue duree, the book explores the influence of family and friends in the creative process, it draws attention to the role that travel and movement play in writing and it explores the wider commitments of authorial life, not as indicators of intertextuality, but as part of the creative process. In taking this seventy year period as its focus, this book moves beyond the traditional periodisations that have characterised literary studies, such as the Victorian or Edwardian novel, the nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century novel or Romanticism, social realism and modernism. It argues that the literary environment was not one of watershed moments; there were continuities between writers separated by several decades or writing in different centuries. At the same time, it draws attention to a seventy year period in which the value of literary work and culture were being contested and transformed. Place and the Scene of Literary Practice will be key reading for those working in Human Geography, particularly Cultural and Historical Geography, Literary Studies and Literary History.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work.

First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria's outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of diamonds. Diamonds were a symbol of political power-only for the very rich and influential. But, in a development that also reflected the British Empire's prosperity, the idea of owning a diamond came to be marketed to the middle class. In all kinds of writings, diamonds began to take on an affordable romance. Considering many of the era's most iconic voices-from Dickens and Tennyson to Kipling and Stevenson-as well as grand entertainments such as The Moonstone, King Solomon's Mines, and the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Munich explores diamonds as fetishes that seem to contain a living spirit exerting powerful effects, and shows how they scintillated the literary and cultural imagination. Based on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism, Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds, revealing a trajectory including Indian celebrity-named diamonds reserved for Asian princes, such as the Great Mogul and the Hope Diamond, their adoption by British royal and aristocratic families, and their discovery in South Africa, the mining of which devastated the area even as it opened the gem up to the middle classes. The story Munich tells eventually finds its way to America, as power and influence crosses the Atlantic, bringing diamonds to a wide consumer culture.

This volume focuses on how travel writing contributed to cultural and intellectual exchange in and between the Dutch- and German-speaking regions from the 1790s to the twentieth-century interwar period. Drawing on a hitherto largely overlooked body of travelers whose work ranges across what is now Germany and Austria, the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium, the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, the contributors highlight the interrelations between the regional and the global and the role alterity plays in both spheres. They therefore offer a transnational and transcultural perspective on the ways in which the foreign was mediated to audiences back home. By combining a narrative perspective on travel writing with a socio-historically contextualized approach, essays emphasize the importance of textuality in travel literature as well as the self-positioning of such accounts in their individual historical and political environments. The first sustained analysis to focus specifically on these neighboring cultural and linguistic areas, this collection demonstrates how topographies of knowledge were forged across these regions by an astonishingly diverse range of travelling individuals from professional scholars and writers to art dealers, soldiers, (female) explorers, and scientific collectors. The contributors address cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing, drawing productively on other disciplines and areas of scholarly research that encompass German Studies, Low Countries Studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of publishing.

This volume will provide students with an introduction to the poetry and life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most popular poets of her day in Britain and America and who has become one of the great icons of Victorianism for the modern age. The authors present a biographical survey, study of her poetry, its critical reception and an assessment of her influence on later poets. This book also examines the complex 'myths' which are associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and offers re-readings of her life and work, particularly in dispelling the myth of the ailing invalid poet-recluse and instead showing her to be one of the great intellectuals of her day, immersed in European history and politics from a very early age. The book situates Browning within broader historical,political and cultural contexts than have yet been examined enabling a better understanding of her poetry and paints the portrait of a fine and innovative poet, an intellectual and an astute political thinker.

Through her selection of fourteen essays, Tess Cosslett charts the rediscovery by feminist critics of the Victorian Women Poets such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and the subsequent developments as critics use a range of modern theoretical approaches to understand and promote the work of these non-canonical and marginalised poets. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism, investigating such questions as, how feminist are these poems, and does a women s tradition really exist? The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored.

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott's novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus-the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott's novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott's female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott's ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Since World War II critics have been predicting the decline of the novel. This book argues that the novel is not dead. Looking at American and English fiction it claims that the novel can not only change the possibilities of art, but also contribute to awareness of life's possibilities.

From the claustrophobic environment of Haworth Parsonage emerged an astonishing range and diversity of character and talent. Between them the two youngest Bronte sisters wrote three novels, each sharply individual in style, purpose and subject-matter. The title, first published in 1968, discusses and illustrates the similarities and differences in the writings of Emily and Anne Bronte, paying particular attention to their place in the development of the Victorian novel. He stresses the complexities of structure and characterisation in Wuthering Heights, introducing the reader first to the background of the novel. This book will be of interest to students of English Literature.

Written by literary scholars, historians of science, and cultural historians, the twenty-two original essays in this collection explore the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships between science and culture through the periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging across the spectrum of periodical titles, the six sections comprise: 'Women, Children, and Gender', 'Religious Audiences', 'Naturalizing the Supernatural', 'Contesting New Technologies', 'Professionalization and Journalism', and 'Evolution, Psychology, and Culture'. The essays offer some of the first 'samplings and soundings' from the emergent and richly interdisciplinary field of scholarship on the relations between science and the nineteenth-century media.

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other. As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzon into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.