The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety.

The strategies that people use to come to terms with death mirror cultural beliefs about such crucial concerns as life's purpose, the idea of happiness, and the nature of ethical relationships. This book considers Nathaniel Hawthorne's representations of strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations--emphasizing their effects on the relationship between men and women. Drawing upon a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, feminist theory, and formal analysis, Weldon's thought-provoking study offers fresh insights into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

Constructing Coleridge examines Coleridge's penchant for re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they preferred in these trying circumstances.

"Byron's Romantic Celebrity" offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. Under that rubric, it investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron's publications, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

The story of the Beatles begins not with the rock-'n'-roll revolution of the 1950s, but in the Romantic revolution of the 1790s, when age-old notions about literature, politics, education, and social relations changed forever. Tracing the Beatles to their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetic, musical, and philosophic roots, "The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles "weaves literary criticism and cultural analysis together to how the Fab Four--in their songs, personalities, and relations with each other--mirror the themes and history of Anglo-American Romanticism.

This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination. -- .

Why is detective fiction so popular? What connects such diverse characters as the 'armchair sleuth', the 'hardboiled dick', and the police detective? Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction uncovers the significance of often-neglected dime novels in revealing early examples of the subgenres of detective fiction - drawing-room mysteries, hardboiled 'tough guy' fiction, police procedurals, and postmodern detective fiction - in the genre's first mass instantiation in the dime novels (1860-1915). A study of over 100 dime novel endings shows the prevalence of subversive representations of gender, race and class, while new readings of iconic detectives like Nick Carter and Allan Pinkerton reveal the enormous influence of these figures on future developments in the detective genre. The book argues that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses - theorized as contamination and containment - explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner, whose detective writings are clearly informed by dime novels.

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.

This study of Dickens in relation to his period shows how deeply he reflected its vibrant novelty, and how his works transform the social and cultural stimuli of the time - technological enterprise, urbanization, class mobility, the sense of profound difference from the preceding age - into a new and flexible fictional form.

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best remembered today as the author of classic works of science fiction, such as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. He was also the author of The Outline of World History, an ambitious chronicle of the world from antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century. Through essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical reception of his works. An introductory essay overviews Wells's literary career and provides a context for understanding his works. Each of the sections that follow treats one of his major works, according to the publication date of his story. Within each section are reviews, essays, or excerpts that exemplify the critical response to that particular work from the time of its appearance to the present day. A bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important modern critical studies of Wells and indicates the tremendous contemporary interest in Wells as an author.

This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more accurate understanding of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers.

At the end of the Eighteenth century, British writers began to celebrate work in a strangely indirect way. Instead of describing diligence as an attribute of character, poets and novelists increasingly identified work with impersonal 'energies' akin to natural force. Chemists traced mental and muscular work back to its source in sunlight, giving rise to the claim (beloved by Nineteenth-century journalists) that 'all the labour done under the sun is really done by it'. The Work of The Sun traces the emergence of this model of work, exploring its sources in middle-class consciousness and its implications for British literature and science.

One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness, a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing, which seems inseparable from the mind's fading as it lets them go. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the young Yeats are elegists of the self; they render life as transparent, ghostlike, dissolving, ungraspable, nearly unrememberable. This vanishing away, this dimness, of Victorian poetry is most obvious in the twilights, mists, shadows, deep horizons, and flowing waters of its central landscape, but it is also a matter of sound and syntax, of repetition and rhythm, texture and line movement. Vanishing Lives examines these features and links them to larger issues, such as the psychology of the individual poets, and the Victorian and modern frames of mind. The tendencies under consideration are less ideas than forms or styles of feeling. They are so universal in the nineteenth century that they may not seem to call for comment, but for all their vagueness they are deep, powerful, resistant to change-an essential stratum of the experience of Victorian poetry. For poets like Yeats, who struggled to move beyond them, they were far more than the trappings of an outmoded poetry. They were a deeply ingrained aesthetic, a style, a morality, not only a way of art to be revised, but a way of living to be outgrown-a Tennysonian way.

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.

What does it mean to 'bear blindness' and why should this be a concern for male poets after Milton? This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition. The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This imaginative revisionist study suggests a new interpretative framework for Victorian men's poetry, while providing detailed and extensive re-readings of many major poems The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.

This book is a historically informed and textually grounded study of the connections between Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, and Nietzsche, who thought of himself as an "attempter." In conversation with the Essais, Nietzsche developed key themes of his oeuvre: experimental scepticism, gay science, the quest for drives beneath consciousness, the free spirit, the affirmation of sexuality and the body, and the meaning of greatness. Robert Miner explores these connections in the context of Nietzsche's reverence for Montaigne-a reverence he held for no other author-and asks what Montaigne would make of Nietzsche. The question arises from Nietzsche himself, who both celebrates Montaigne and includes him among a small number of authors to whose judgment he is prepared to submit.

This book explores various forms of cultural influence and exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, these essays not only constitute a substantial and innovative contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries, but also describe a pattern of cultural encounter which was predicated upon exchange and a sense of commonality rather than upon the perception of difference or alterity which has so often been discerned by critical descriptions of British romantic-period engagements with non-British cultures. The volume ought to appeal to a broad and genuinely international academic audience with interests in eighteenth-century and romantic-period culture in Britain and Scandinavia as well as to undergraduates taking courses in eighteenth-century, romantic, and Scandinavian studies.

Examining innovations in audience behaviour, musical ensembles and mass-music movements, this book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works of the day, Weliver draws upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by professional musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive. This interdisciplinary undertaking will interest those working in the fields of English literature, musicology, social history and cultural studies.

Appropriation emerged during the Celtic Revival as a singular mode of engaging with the Shakespearean text to conceptualise and frame national identities in Ireland using the English language. With The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake, Adam Putz has examined the ways in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, and W. B. Yeats. His close readings underscore the instability of the binary oppositions upon which these writers relied to predicate their appropriations. However, Putz finds in James Joyce an urgent concern for the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics mediated the relationship with Shakespeare for a generation of Irish men and women. Therefore, Putz reconsiders periodization and literary inheritance, the nation and modernity in order to point up the contingency of those values located in and imposed upon Shakespeare during the Revival.

Byron is at the forefront of debate on politics, gender, sexuality, reception studies and popular culture in the Romantic period. This collection presents twelve outstanding new essays on Byron by leading critics from the US, Canada, and the UK including Steven Bruhm, Peter Cochran, Paul Curtis, Caroline Franklin, Peter Kitson, Ghislaine McDayter, Tim Morton, David Punter and Pamela Kao, Michael Simpson, Philip Shaw, Nanora Sweet and Susan Wolfson.

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.

From a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, the most revealing, fascinating, and important biography of one of our greatest literary figures.

Jane Austen and the State of the Nation explores Jane Austen's references to politics and to political economics and concludes that Austen was a liberal Tory who remained consistent in her political agenda throughout her career as a novelist. Read with this historical background, Austen's books emerge as state-of-the-nation or political novels.

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

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.