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.

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.

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.

A truly cosmopolitan Irish writer, George Moore (1852-1933) was a fascinating figure of the fin de siecle, moving between countries, crossing genre and medium boundaries, forever exploring and promulgating aesthetic trends and artistic developments: Naturalism in the novel and the theatre, Impressionism in painting, Decadence and the avant-garde, Literary Wagnerism, the Irish Literary Revival, New Woman culture. This volume on border-crossings offers a variety of critical perspectives to approach Moore's multifaceted oeuvre and personality. The essays by contributors from various national backgrounds and from a wide range of disciplines establish original points of contact between literary creation, art history, Wagnerian opera, gender studies, sociology, and altogether reposition Moore as a major representative of European turn-of-the-century culture.

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.

Part intellectual history, part advice book, and part polemic, this collection of original essays and poetry is a defence and celebration of the achievements - moral, material, intellectual, and artistic - of black women in Victorian America. Writing as a Christian, a mother, and a wife, Mrs Mosell held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public eye. A source of instruction and inspiration in its own time, it remains today a valuable document of black American cultural and intellectual history.

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.

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.

This work explores the nature of Romantic literature that was about to be born in Friedrich Schlegel's texts during the years around 1800. The main object of the study is the possibility of thinking of Romantic literature as an attempt to integrate literature and philosophy. The question that needs to be answered is the following: is it possible to see Schlegel's idea of Romantic literature as a daybreak or nightfall between the daylight of reason and the mysteries of creation? And secondly: if it is possible to think of Romantic literature as a combination of reflection and productive fantasy, then: how should we read and treat the exemplary Romantic novel - Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde?

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.

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.

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.

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.

An abrupt break in the more conventional modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century. However, as Jed Rasula's alternative history shows, modernist aesthetics owe a significant debt to techniques and styles pioneered and established throughout the nineteenth century. An ambitious inter-arts exploration of patterns between one generation and another form the through-line of History of a Shiver: the backdrop of Wagner's epic nineteenth-century operas illuminates the music of Arnold Schoenberg and the Viennese School, in addition to literary works by Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Ezra Pound; the collodion glass plates deployed by Victorian photographers reveal the debt of Dada and Man Ray's innovative photograms to an era associated with realism; the brass bands conducted by John Philip Sousa in the 1880s and 1890s form a blueprint for instrumentation that gave rise to jazz; and the French symbolist verse of Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine inspire the surrealist artworks of Salvador Dali. In addition to these connections, Rasula's book similarly considers phenomena in theatre, sculpture, and the "visual music" of figures like Thomas Wilfrid and Wassily Kandinsky. Taken together, the chapters of History of a Shiver emphasize the importance of inter-collaboration and influence in an artistic period when artfroms are traditionally isolated from one another and primarily celebrated for severing ties with the past.

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.

In this book, Dr. Ekman examines Strindberg's four plays of 1907: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican, the works which have gained most resonance internationally. For the first time, these works are studied in relation to Strindberg's lifelong obsession with the five senses and their function in stage plays, both symbolic and dramatic. The fact that impressions from a stage can only be seen and heard led Strindberg to disregard the senses in favour of the insights of wisdom and inner vision; and it is from this position that the Chamber Plays were written. Examined from this perspective, much that seems obscure in these plays and their new style of drama is revealed in an original and clarifying light.

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.

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

Understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, providing the first extensive study in English of his early literary works. The name Friedrich Nietzsche resonates around the world. Although known primarily as a philosopher, Nietzsche began his writing career while still a boy with literary texts: poetry, prose, and dramas. The present book is the first extensive study in English of these early literary works. It understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through his first two years as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, that is, through the 1872 publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Knowledge of Nietzsche's early literary writings further underscores the value of The Birth of Tragedy as a work of world literature. The present study makes available almost all of Nietzsche's early poetry and extensive excerpts from his early prose works and dramas - much of it in English for the first time - along with commentary. A final, extensive chapter on The Birth of Tragedy treats it as the culmination of the early literary works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.

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.