Pointing to an early instance in Hebrew literary history, And Rachel Stole the Idols takes its title from a biblical episode in which a daughter seizes control of a paternal spiritual legacy and makes it her own. This episode is the thematic key to Wendy Zierler's in-depth research of the ways modern Hebrew women writers - after centuries of silence - took control of the language of Hebrew literary culture, laying claim to icons of femininity and recasting them for their own purposes. Zierler picks up where other Hebrew scholars have left off, offering original analysis that brings feminist theory to bear on the study of modern Hebrew women writers. In recognition that there is no single feminist approach, nor a universally accepted definition of gender, this book incorporates a broad range of feminist reading strategies including Anglo-American gynocriticism, French feminist theory, and feminist critical methods in anthropology, biblical studies, and geography. The chapters within examine the translated work of women who made early and significant contributions to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature. These range from prose writers Sarah Feige Meinkin Foner, H

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontes' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Bronte Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Bronte novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Maire Bhui Ni Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary; 1774-1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Maire Bhui composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

Transcendentalism is well-known as a peculiarly American philosophical and religious movement. Less well-known is the extent to which such famous Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau drew on religions of Asia for their inspiration. Arthur Versluis offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between the American Transcendentalists and Asian religions. He argues that an influx of new information about these religions shook nineteenth-century American religious consciousness to the core. With the publication of ever more material on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the Judeo-Christian tradition was inevitably placed as just one among a number of religious traditions. Fundamentalists and conservatives denounced this influx as a threat, but the Transcendentalists embraced it, poring over the sacred books of Asia to extract ethical injunctions, admonitions to self-transcendence, myths taken to support Christian doctrines, and manifestations of a supposed coming universal religion. The first major study of this relationship since the 1930s, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions is also the first to consider the post-Civil War Transcendentalists, such as Samuel Johnson and William Rounseville Alger. Examining the entire range of American Transcendentalism, Versluis's study extends from the beginnings of Transcendentalist Orientalism in Europe to its continuing impact on twentieth-century American culture. This exhaustive and enlightening work sheds important new light on the history of religion in America, comparative religion, and nineteenth-century American literature and popular culture.

Richard Marsh was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. His bestselling The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker's Dracula. A prolific author within a range of genres including Gothic, crime, humour and romance, Marsh produced stories about shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life. However, while Marsh's work appealed to a public greedy for sensationalist fiction, both the cultural elite of the day and twentieth-century literary critics looked askance at his popular middlebrow fiction. In the wake of the recent rediscovery of Marsh's fiction, this essay collection builds on burgeoning scholarly interest in the author. Marsh emerges here as a fascinating writer who helped shape the genres of popular fiction and whose stories offer surprising responses to issues of criminality, gender and empire in this period of cultural transition. -- .

This volume undertakes a fundamental reassessment of utopianism during the modernist period. It charts the rich spectrum of literary utopian projects between 1885 and 1945, and reconstructs their cultural work by locating them in the material 'spaces' in which they originated. The book brings together work by leading academics and younger scholars.

This book offers both an introduction to the vibrant field of literary tourism studies and a selection of cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research. Indispensable for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture, it provides fascinating insights into the reception of, among others, Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron and Wordsworth.

An unusual grouping of mainly British writers, this insightful study includes some, like Henry James, who are indisputably leaders of the canon regardless of genre, and others, like Algernon Blackwood, who wrote almost exclusively in the supernatural; all, however, were clearly masters of this genre. The author, Edward Wagenknecht, writes from a long lifetime of scholarly study and publishing, thoroughly internalized familiarity with all of the exemplary works chosen for examination, and personal friendship fostered by extensive epistolary intercourse with two of the subjects, Walter de la Mare and Marjorie Bowen. The seven chapters on the individual writers each examine plot, character, mood, and setting in a traditional sense, sparked by personal observations and unique comparisons. Each study is preceded by a biographical sketch and documented by comprehensive bibliography and notes. In the case of the less studied writers, like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, these chapters may be the fullest accounts ever published. For all, Wagenknecht combines a fan's appreciation with a scholar's insights to produce an important and enjoyable book.

Setting out to correct the inadequacies of many written accounts of slavery, teacher and social activist Octavia Albert added her own incisive commentary to the personal narratives of former slaves. Her early interviews, like many antebellum slave narratives, depict cruel punishments, divided families, and debilitating labour. Seeing herself as a public advocate for social change, Albert called for every Christian's personal acceptance of responsibility for slavery's legacies and lessons. As well as its historical value, the book has many merits as a work of literature, using dialogue and experiments with dialect, and incorporating songs and poems in the text.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), one of the most distinctive writers of the Victorian period. The first selection to place Clough's poetry alongside his prose, it allows readers to explore how his poems are connected to his literary criticism and his lectures on literary history, to his letters and diaries, and to his writing on politics and economics. A political radical and religious sceptic, Clough emerges as a strikingly modern Victorian: he writes honestly and directly about sexuality, and his work is informed by a cosmopolitan perspective that views Victorian society in the context of other national, political, and cultural traditions. Clough's innovative poems incorporate a diverse range of voices and styles, borrowing and reimagining aspects of the epic, the drama, and the novel. And they reveal a side of Victorian culture-irreverent, iconoclastic, and self-aware-that is often ignored today. Detailed notes identify and explain Clough's comments on major political events such as the European revolutions of 1848, and his allusions to a wide array of different writers and texts. The edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Clough, and a Chronology, which enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works.

This book provides provocative information on poetry written in response to the most revolutionary set of events seen in Britain since the 1640s: "Peterloo," a peaceful protest that became a massacre; "Cato Street," a government scripted rebellion; and the "Queen Caroline Controversy," when the estranged wife of George IV tried to claim her crown.

This engrossing book describes how four twentieth-century women writers-Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Grace Paley-have inherited and adapted the classical tradition of American romance fiction. Emily Miller Budick argues that this tradition, exemplified by the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, is inherently skepticist, questioning whether and how we know reality. It is also sharply critical of the patriarchal bias of American culture, which is understood by these writers as a way of evading or settling philosophical doubt. Analyzing such works as The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Portrait of a Lady, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Invisible Man, Budick explores this antipatriarchal critique and shows how it enables the twentieth-century women romancers to inherit the tradition. In their writings, however-in McCullers's Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and Paley's short stories-these writers do more than further the concerns of the male authors. They also explore the idea of maternal knowledge and think through alternatives not only to the patriarchal organization of society but to matriarchal constructions as well. Budick offers provocative insights into what it means to inherit a tradition--in particular across lines of gender, but also across lines of race--as she discusses the ways these four women writers revise the genre of romance to accommodate the exigencies of modern American society.

Raff sets her study in the early nineteenth century world, depicting the cultural debates and literary fandom that provided Austen a fertile playing field. She traces Austen's increasingly libidinal narrative presence (from early experiments in the narrator-reader relationship, to the seductive appeal of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and on to the outright authorial titillation of Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey), while simultaneously offering analysis of her biography that connects prose and life. She targets Austen's experience in 1814 as romantic advisor to her niece Fanny Knight as pivotal to her shift to teacher-cum-paramour. The revelation of Austen's thoughts about writing and love-making and of the techniques she employed to seduce readers, display Austen's command over not just her famously effervescent prose, but also her notorious fan base. Raff's original and audacious argument is combined with a lively, conspiratorial style that will delight many readers, especially Jane Austen mavens, the bewitched Janeites, who will be gratified to find out that Austen doesn't just seem to be speaking to them-she was, in fact, consciously courting their affection all along.

In Oscar Wilde's Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore Wilde's fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that Wilde's substantial "Chatterton" notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of Wilde's career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources, Oscar Wilde's Chatterton explains why, in Wilde's personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.

Myths of Power - Anniversary Edition sets out to interpret the fiction of the Bronte sisters in light of a Marxist analysis of the historical conditions in which it was produced. Its aim is not merely to relate literary facts, but by a close critical examination of the novels, to find in them a significant structure of ideas and values which related to the Brontes' ambiguous situation within the class-system of their society. Its intention is to forge close relations between the novels, nineteenth-century ideology, and historical forces, in order to illuminate the novels themselves in a radically new perspective. When originally published in 1975 (second edition in 1988), it was the first full-length Marxist study of the Brontes and is now reissued to celebrate 30 years since its first publication. It includes a new Introduction by Terry Eagleton which reflects on the changes which have happened in Marxist literary criticism since 1988, and situates this reissue of the second edition in current debates.

Richard C. Sha's revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period.

Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism.

Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha's innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity--or purposelessness--became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction.

At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, "Perverse Romanticism" makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ The Letters Of Charles Dickens: 1836-1870; Volume 3 Of The Letters Of Charles Dickens; Charles Dickens Charles Dickens, Georgina Hogarth, Mary Dickens Chapman and Hall, 1882

This book is the first full-length biographical and critical study of the American Realist author Harold Frederic (1856-1898). As London correspondent for the New York Times and the author of nine novels, Frederic was internationally known at the time of his death; today he is remembered mainly for his novel "The Damnation of Theron Ware" (1896). Drawing on archival and published material not available to earlier writers on Frederic, Myers paints a fascinating portrait of the man and his times as an expatriate in London in the 1890s, his friendship with James, Crane, Wells, and their circle, and the scandal surrounding his death at the age of 42.

Frederic was a colorful fellow. As a correspondent in London in the 1890s, he knew Henry James, Stephen Crane, George Gissing, and a host of other literary characters. He fully lived a bohemian life, keeping a real wife and a common-law wife simultaneously, fathering broods of children, writing journalism and novels at a great rate, and dying at 42 of overwork--partly because he let his second wife talk him into refusing medical help (leading to a scandalous court case). Myers concentrates on four main themes: Frederic as an expatriate; his work as representative of the transition from realism to naturalism in American literature; Frederic as a transitional author in the shift from 19th century to 20th century styles of publishing; and Frederic as a representative of the fin de siecle. Myers has worked extensively with Frederic's correspondence as well as in publishers' archives (especially Scribner's), and he sees Frederic as a writer who flourished just as the American literary marketplace was being transformed from the rather poky 19th-century model into the faster-paced 20th-century version so familiar today. This biography will interest not just specialists and Frederic scholars, but also anyone with an interest in American literary culture in one of its defining moments.

Through theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.

"The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830" addresses the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding the reconceptualization of fame between 1750-1830. As the first sustained scholarly analysis of fame in this period, this interdisciplinary book examines genres from history writing to literature, public and private memoirs to political treatises in English and in French in order to explore 'The age of personality's' obsession with instantaneous publicity. In an age of expanding print culture, the classical notion of posthumous reward was becoming increasingly open to question, as the need 'to be brilliant', as Hazlitt put it, in the contemporary moment became all.

Set around the events of the succession struggle of 1142 in medieval Bohemia the main character, Witiko, the traditional founder of the Rosenberg Family, searches for the Right, finds it and his beloved, while never losing touch with the common folk. His quest is amid the panoramic backdrop of national Bohemian politics and history, with his fate paralleling that of the acknowledged rightful duke, Wladislaw, who is also seeking the path of justice. Witiko is considered one of the most significant German historical novels of the Nineteenth Century.

"Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain" examines ways in which British writers and readers used the idea of the Middle Ages to challenge contemporary political structures and to claim historical national rights at a time when fears that Britain would follow the example of the French Revolution caused the British government to undermine individual and collective rights. Through the consideration of canonical authors such as Blake, Scott, and Wordsworth and of lesser-studied works such as radical press writings and popular drama, this study suggests that the imaginative appeal to the social structures and literary forms of the Middle Ages served as a powerful means of raising awareness of Britain's past and the tradition of freedom.

British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, Thackeray, and Baillie, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. In this comprehensive study of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s, Schmid traces the activities of three" salonnieres" Mary Berry, Lady Holland, and the Countess of Blessington. Mapping out the central place these circles held in London, this study explains to what extent they shaped intellectual debate and publishing ventures. Using a large number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - the book establishes sociable networks of days gone by.