First published in 1968, this reissue of Dr. Craik 's critical appreciation of the completed novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront is seminal for the way in which it shifts emphasis away from the Bront family biography towards a detailed critical analysis of the novels themselves.

Separate chapters are given to each of the seven novels. The author 's aims and techniques in each are assessed and Dr. Craik shows what light the books throw on each other, how they are related to the novels of the Bront 's predecessors, and how the Bront novels compare with their great contemporaries in the nineteenth century novel.

"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.

This volume examines the literature and culture of nineteenth century America, covering genres such as the early American novel, realist fiction and historical romance.

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.

Students new to the work of William Morris will find the full range of his achievements covered in this reissue of Peter Faulkner's excellent biography, first published in 1980. The author has carefully placed Morris in the context of the Victorian age, but has also suggested the relevance of his ideas today. The six chapters are organised biographically and cover all aspects of Morris's work in poetry, fiction, design and socialist politics.

The emphasis is on his continuous struggle against the age in which he lived, seen as an idealism which went through various stages from the wistfulness of The Earthly Paradise through the practical activities of the firm of Morris & Company to the socialism of Morris's later years. The book quotes freely from writings by Morris which are not easily accessible and gives an overall account from which the student can develop his specialist interests. This reissue will appeal to sixth-formers and undergraduates interested in the Victorian period, as seen through one of its most striking personalities.

When this book appeared in 1980, Morris's reputation had risen again after the low estimates of the interwar period. This was due both to the reappraisal of his politics and to the expanding popularity of his designs. Against the Age offers a clear account of Morris's career for those developing an interest in his numerous achievements. It covers the whole range of Morris's work, and argues for his significance as a writer of both poetry and prose. Since 1980 our knowledge of Morris has been enriched by the publication of Norman Kelvin's edition of his Collected Letters, by the late Nicholas Salmond's editions of his contributions to the socialist journals, by Fiona MacCarthy's biography of 1984, and by the increasing recognition of Morris as a pioneer of environmentalism. However, the book retains its value for its wide coverage and its balanced attitude to Morris's achievements, and for its encouragement to readers to consider the issues that make Morris of continuing importance today.

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 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.

Joel Chandler Harris was internationally famous in his own time and has a surprisingly broad scholarly and popular following in ours. His portraits of slaves and former slaves, particularly Uncle Remus and Free Joe, poor whites, and Brer Rabbit, the archetypal trickster hero, have influenced many other writers, including Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and a wide array of children's authors from Beatrix Potter to A. A. Milne. Harris also left a lasting mark on popular culture, most clearly manifested through Disney's ^ISong of the South^R and at Disney World attractions featuring versions of Harris's characters. He singlehandedly preserved and made internationally famous the Brer Rabbit folktales, the largest body of African American oral folklore that the world has ever known. Additionally, Harris was a major New South journalist who accelerated the process of reconciliation between North and South and promoted racial tolerance after the Civil War. This reference book is a complete bibliographic guide to the scholarly response to Harris during the last two decades. The introduction explores such issues as Harris's renderings of black dialect, Southern character, and folklore, and his influence on popular culture. The first part is a supplement to Bickley's earlier bibliography of Harris, which covered the period 1862-1976. The second part provides more than 300 entries for books, articles, and dissertations about Harris published after 1976. Entries are grouped in sections according to year of publication, and then alphabetically within each section. Each entry is fully annotated, and a detailed index concludes the volume.

First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake - England's only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that ?mental things are alone real?, Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake's thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking ?the sickness of Albion? Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique.

Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake's sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, ?the Everlasting Gospel?. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as ?the three provincial centuries?, is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.

Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality-what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable-from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith-Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of "modern" sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow's Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures-futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.

To what extent did Charles Dickens see himself as a medium of forces beyond his conscious control? What did he think such subconscious mechanisms might be, and how did his thoughts on the subject play out in his writings? "Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens" traces these questions through three Dickens novels: "Oliver Twist," "Dombey and Son," and "Bleak House." It is the first book-length study to approach Dickensian psychology from the vantage point of what the speculations of Dickens's--rather than of our own--had to say about mental phenomena, both normal and abnormal.

"Poetics en passant" presents a "cross-channel" poetics that redefines the relationship between "Victorian" and "modern" poetry by understanding Christina Rossetti's poetics of "stealth" as an important counterpart to Baudelairean "shock."

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the entire range of Tennyson's poetry, with emphasis on the great period up to and including In Memoriam, but also with chapters on Maud, the Idylls of the King, and the best of the later poems. Taking the view that every poem contains its own literary history, Dwight Culler traces Tennyson's evolving image of himself as a poet and the relation of this image to changing literary structures. He particularly emphasizes the "frame" device by which Tennyson first mediated between himself and the world and then, inverting it, placed himself in the world. He also explores the longer "composted" poem by which Tennyson declared himself a Victorian Alexandrian. Eschewing the autobiographical emphasis of recent years, Culler provides readings of Maud, Locksley Hall, The Palace of Art, Tithonus, and the Idylls of the King that depart significantly from previous interpretations. His sympathy for the Victorian element in Tennyson also recovers for modern taste several neglected areas of the poetry: the English Idylls, the civic poem, and the poems of social converse. Culler sees Tennyson's faith in the magical power of the word as the source of his gift and, when he loses that faith, the reason for its decline.

Addressed to all readers of Our Nig, from professional scholars of African American writing through to a more general readership, this book explores both Our Nig's key cultural contexts and its historical and literary significance as a narrative. Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern 'free black', yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson's book combines several different literary genres - realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our Nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our Nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class. This study explores how, as a result, Our Nig tells a series of disturbing two-stories about America's constitutional guarantee of 'freedom' and the way these relate to Frado's farm life.

In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages'. The influence on Victorian culture of the 'Middle Ages' (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance) was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This 'medievalism' led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders being acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically 'Victorian'-in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on a Gothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to their homes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of 'medievalism' in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature, politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India, amongst other places.

Adapting Poe collects new interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars that combine the latest work in adaptation theory with fresh discussions of Edgar Allan Poe, his work, and popular culture. The book examines a range of genres and media into which Poe has been adapted, such as film, comic art, music, literary criticism, promotional campaigns, television, and internet videos. Each essay re-evaluates Poe's influence not only on popular culture today, but also as a significant figure in its development. As a whole, this collection demonstrates Poe's pervasive and continuing relevance to the images and ideas of contemporary culture.

First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of interest in metaphysical and eighteenth-century poetry and corresponding ebb of enthusiasm for Romantic poetry and for Victorian poetry in particular. Most of the essays in this book take as their starting point questions raised by the debate on Victorian poetry, both earlier in this century and in the more recent past. There are essays on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, on that of Clough, who until recently has been neglected, and Hopkins, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he is usually considered to be a modern poet. The volume is especially valuable in that it will give a clearer understanding of the nature of Victorian poetry, concentrating as it does on those areas of a poet's work where critical discussion seems most necessary.

For poets throughout the world Rome "was" the world. This is particularly true for Russian poets, owing to the anagrammatical relation of the words "Rome" and "mir" (Rome and world). The legacy of ancient Rome has always constituted an important component of the Russian cultural consciousness. The revitalization of classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Russia and new approaches to antiquity prompted many of the Russian Symbolists to seek their inspiration in ancient Rome. Vladimir Solovyov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Valery Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Maksimilian Voloshin, Vasily Komarovsky, and Mikhail Kuzmin all made significant contributions to what is often referred to as the "Roman text." "The Legacy of Ancient Rome in the Russian Silver Age" analyzes the forms involved in creating the Roman image and explores its functionality within the given poetic system. In addition to the formal analysis, the background and the stimulus leading up to the composition of a particular poem are explored, as well as allusions to legends, myths and Rome's geography and architecture. Moreover, this study considers the function of the Roman text in Russian Symbolist poetics and the works of the individual poets. Finally, the relation between the Roman and Petersburg texts of Russian literature is explored, since many of the Russian Symbolist poets found in Rome a perfect metaphor for their studies of the city and "urban" poetry.

This timely book treats Hardy's recurring use of one of the major informing myths of Western culture--that of a collision between a solar god and an earth goddess. Stave uses a chronological examination of Hardy's Wessex novels to highlight the author's evolving consciousness of the connections among patriarchy, Christianity, sexism, and classism. From the gentle affirmation of Far From the Madding Crowd to the grim Jude the Obscure, Stave paints a world in which the goddess figures die out, displaced by messianic gods, and a Pagan worldview gives way to a world devoid of spiritual meaning.

Filling a critical void, this book examines French women dramatists of the nineteenth-century who staged works prior to the lifting of censorship laws in 1864. Though none staged overtly feminist drama, Sophie de Bawr, Sophie Gay, Virginie Ancelot, and Delphine Girardin questioned patriarchal dominance and reconstructed ideals of womanhood.

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.