At the center of Hardy's aesthetic practice is the recognition of desire as a necessary and fundamental condition of human existence. Yearning, disappointment, frustration and loss determine the relationship of his characters and poetic personae to the world and the systems in which their sense of self is expressed and constituted. Yet his work also explores the positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire. Structured around the themes of home and homelessness; eroticism; Poor Men, Ladies and social aspiration; the transgressivity of cross dressing; the creation of "sapphic spaces;" aesthetic desire and its fulfilment in the achieved work of art, Thomas Hardy and Desire demonstrates Hardy's commitment, as an artist in pursuit of "a way to the better," to exploring how the energy of desire pushes beyond the boundaries of class, sexuality, gender and even language itself to bring new ways of being and doing into the realm of knowledge.

"The union of religion and political agitation...remains constant throughout the century....It is most evident in the spritual autobiographies of evalgelists like Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, and Amanda Smith. Smith's 1893 account of her career in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she rose from deaconess despite the significant opposition of male preachers, is all the more striking against the backdrop of her childhood experience of slavery. In the transport of her own conversion experience, the young Amanda Smith ran to a mirror to see whether her color had changed."--Eric J. Sundquist in The New York Times Book Review

Is ventriloquism just for dummies? What is at stake in neo-Victorian fiction's desire to 'talk back' to the nineteenth century? This book explores the sexual politics of dialogues between the nineteenth century and contemporary fiction, offering a new insight into the concept of ventriloquism as a textual and metatextual theme in literature.

Ever since the fifth instalment of the Pickwick Papers in 1836 scholars have expressed amazement at the virtually overnight emergence of the 24-year-old Charles Dickens from an unknown nobody to the literary lion of the day.At one bound he leapt from nowhere to the summit of literary success and fame. How did he do it?This is the classic modern study of how Dickens staged his grand entrance. Critics of his day thought he did so without warning or fanfare. How was it possible for an obscure newspaper reporter to write, in his early twenties, such a brilliant, popular work as Pickwick? Where did he acquire the nicety of observation, the fineness of tact, the exquisite humour, the wit, heartiness, sympathy with all things good and beautiful in human nature, the perception of character, the pathos, and accuracy of description?This work is a thorough and illuminating study of this central question, and fully illuminates Dickens's early development.

Born Rosa Lebensboym in Belarus, Anna Margolin (1887-1952) settled permanently in America in 1913. A brilliant yet largely forgotten poet, her reputation rests on her volume of poetry published in Yiddish in 1929 in New York City. Although written in the 1920s, Margolin's poetry is remarkably fresh and contemporary, dealing with themes of anxiety, loneliness, sexual tensions, and the search for intellectual and spiritual identity, all of which were clearly reflected in her own life choices. Sensitively and beautifully translated here, the poems appear both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Shirley Kumove's fascinating critical-biographical introduction highlights Margolin's tempestuous and unconventional life. An exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, Margolin adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle, and threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments beyond her two marriages.

This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the close and complex relationship between Britain and the life and work of Ivan Turgenev. The author examines Turgenev's interest in English literature and his reception by the British from the 1850s through to the present day. Reprinting important articles previously inaccessible to the general reader, it includes a new introduction and an extensive bibliography and index.'Readers of this journal will need no reminder of the enormous contribution Patrick Waddington has made to Turgenev studies during the past twenty five years or so. Its pages contain much of the valuable material his indefatigable research has produced during that period. The volume under review is in a sense a celebration and summation of part of the work accomplished in those twenty five years. In it the editor, with his customary scholarship, good sense and meticulous attention to detail, has brought together previously published articles, essays and reviews by British critics, writers, scholars and literary historians, on the subject of Anglo-Saxon perspectives of Turgenev, in the process also shedding light on the Russian writer's possible influence on English literature in the nineteenth century.'New Zealand Slavonic Journal

A fascinating intertextual study of the classic biblical tragedy of Saul, the first king of Israel, as first narrated in biblical narrative and later reworked in Lamartine's drama Saul: Trag+--die and Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Plot and characterization are each explored in detail in this study, and in each of the narrations the hero's tragic fate emerges both as the result of a character flaw and also as a consequence of the ambivalent role of the deity, showing a double theme underlying not only the biblical vision but also its two very different retellings nearer to our own times.

Long confounded with a monolithic British entity or misrepresented as 'Lakers' and 'Cockneys', the diverse regional forms of 'English Romanticism' are ripe for reassessment. Ranging west of a line between the Wye at Tintern and Jane Austen's Chawton, this book offers a first reconfiguration of Romantic culture in terms of English regional identity.

The conventional picture of the young Hopkins as a conservative High-Church ritualist is starkly contested by this study which draws upon his unpublished Oxford essays on philosophy to reveal a boldly speculative intellectual liberal. Less concerned with Christian factionalism than with countering contemporary threats to faith itself, Hopkins' thought is seen to follow that of his teachers Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who turned to Kant and Hegel to vouchsafe the grounds of Christian belief against contemporary scientism. Hopkins' personal metaphysic of 'inscape' and 'instress', which has long been recognized as crucial to the understanding of his poetry, is traced here to concepts derived from the 'British Idealism' he encountered at Oxford and the new energy physics of the 1850s and 1860s. By locating his thought at the intellectual avant-garde of his age, the striking modernity of his poetry need no longer be seen as an historical anomaly. The book offers radical re-readings not only of his metaphysics and theology, but also of his best-known poems.

A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality. Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and "noir" literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virigina Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets is often what it tries hardest not to see.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

Surveying the later work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets.

This book uses the theme of "debatable lands," a term first applied to disputed parts of the Anglo-Scottish border, to explore aspects of writing in the Romantic period. Walter Scott brought it to a wider public, and the phrase came to be applied, by metaphorical extension, to debates which were not so much geographical but intellectual, political or artistic. These debates are pursued in a collection of essays grouped under the headings "Britain and Ireland" and Europe and Beyond."

This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of 145 social gospel novels. Describing various conflicts presented in the American popular literary history that advocated social reform via Christian ethics during the latter half of the 19th century, the author also documents the existence of a sizable body of social Christian fiction in the period between 1865 and 1900. Wright examines the movement within American Protestant churches that called for the application of Christian principles to the solution of social and economic problems, particularly those related to the confrontation of Christian ethic and the changes generated by the shift from agriculture to industry in the United States. The introduction presents the complex issues associated with the rapid industrialization and urbanization of this country and with the conflict of Protestant values with those of the rising middle class. Individual chapters explore the varieties of social Christian novels, the effect of social change on theology as represented in the social Christian novel, and the social Christian novel as literature. The only book of its kind about social gospel fiction, the work surveys the subject from divergent points of view. Works examining the causes of economic and theological maladjustment in the nation are presented and works concerned with the effects. The Social Christian Novel will be of immeasurable value in nineteenth-century American studies, the study of American literature, and studies in American social history.

Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton assembles a collection of essays on the compelling topic of death in two monumental representatives of the early modern canon, Edmund Spenser and John Milton. The volume draws its impetus from the conviction that death is a central, yet curiously understudied, preoccupation for Spenser and Milton, contending that death--in all its early modern reformations and deformations--is an indispensable backdrop for any attempt to articulate the relationship between Spenser and Milton.

"A Tale of Two Cities" has always been one of Dickens's most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

Displaying scant interest in native sciences of materials, Poe seems the most un-American of American writers during an era of literary nationalism; yet he was at the same time a pragmatic magazinist, fully engaged in popular culture and intensely concerned with the "republic of letters" in the United States. This volume contains an introduction that considers the tension between Poe's "otherworldly settings and his historically marked representations of violence, as well as a capsule biography situating Poe in his historical context. The historical essays in this book cover such topics as Poe and the American Publishing Industry, Poe's Sensationalism, Poe's relationship to gender constructions, and Poe and American Privacy. This volume also includes a bibliographical essay, a chronology of Poe life, a bibliography, illustrations, and an index.

This book explores Sara Coleridge's critical intelligence and theoretical reach. It shows her in various critical guises: editing works by her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting on her own poetry and prose, and writing diversely brilliant criticism of classical and English literature.

Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.

This book re-conceives Christina Rossetti's poetic identity by exposing the androcentric bias inherent in the histories of the Rossetti family and of Pre-Raphaelitism, by turning new attention to the Rossetti women, and by reconstituting a female and religious community for Rossetti's writing. Drawing on extensive archival research, Mary Arseneau investigates how Rossetti's religious faith sustains her poetic practice and authorizes her cultural and aesthetic critique; the result is a re-evaluation and re-contextualization of the whole range of Rossetti's writing.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

"Modern Poetry and Ethnography: Yeats, Frost, Warren, Heaney, and the Poet as Anthropologist maps a new approach to the works of W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Seamus Heaney. Heuston analyzes the ways the works of each writer represent and explain a country or region (Ireland for Yeats, New England for Frost, the American South for Warren, and Northern Ireland for Heaney) as if the writers were anthropologists or ethnographers. This project argues provocatively that literary critics can benefit greatly from the insights and theories of anthropology and ethnography"--

Many studies of fictions of city life take the flneur as the characteristic metropolitan type and streets and plazas as definitive urban spaces. Looking at novels and films set in London and Paris from L'Assommoir to Nil By Mouth, this book shows that mass housing is equally central to images of the modern city.

Richard Cardwell was given the Elma Dangerfield Award of the International Byron Society for the best book on Byron in 2005-06 Byron, arguably, was and remains the most famous and infamous English poet in the modern period in Continental Europe. From Portugal in the West to Russia in the East, from Scandinavia in the North to Spain in the South he inspired and provoked, was adored and reviled, inspired notions of freedom in subject lands and, with it, the growth of national idealisms which, soon, would re-draw the map of Europe. At the same time the Byronic persona, incarnate in Childe Harold, Manfred, Lara and others, was received with enthusiasm and fear as experience demonstrated that Byron's Romantic outlook was two-edged, thrilling and appalling in the same moment. All the great writers-Goethe, Mickiewicz, Lermontov, Almeida Garret, Espronceda, Lamartine, among many others-strove to outdo, imitate, revise, and integrate the sublime Lord into their own cultures, to create new national voices, and to dissent from the old order. The volume explores Byron's European reception in its many guises, bringing new evidence, challenging old assumptions, and offering fresh perspectives on the protean impact of Lord Byron on the Continent. This book consistes of two volumes. Series Editor: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London Contributors Richard A. Cardwell, University of Nottingham, UK Joanne Wilkes, University of Auckland, NZ Peter Cochran, Cambridge, UK Ernest Giddey, University of Lausanne, Switzerland Edoardo Zuccato, IULM University, Milan Giovanni Iamartino, University of Milan, Italy Derek Flitter, University of Birmingham, UK Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa, University of Lisbon, Portugal Mihaela Anghelescu Irimia, University of Bucharest, Romania Frank Erik Pointner, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Achim Geisenhansluke, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Theo D'haen, Leiden University, The Netherlands Martin Prochazka, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Miroslawa Modrzewska, University of Gdansk, Poland Orsolya Rakai, Budapest, Hungary Nina Diakonova, St. Petersburg, Russia Vitana Kostadinova, Plovdiv University, Bulgaria Jorgen E. Nielsen, Copenhagen, Denmark Bjorn Tysdahl, University of Oslo, Norway Ingrid Elam, Sweden Anahit Bekaryan, Institute of Fine Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia Innes Merabishvili, State University of Tbilisi, Georgia Litsa Trayiannoudi, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Massimiliano Demata, Mansfield College, Oxford, UK

This book is about how France's two major documentary authors of the nineteenth century - Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola - incorporate medical knowledge about the body into their works, and in so doing exploit its metaphorical potential of the body to engage in critical reflection about the accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge.