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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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"--

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.

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

This is a study of allusions to Alfred Tennyson's poetry in works of fiction from the Victorian period to the present day. Until now, the study of literary allusion has focused on allusions made by poets to other poets. In "Tennyson Among the Novelists", John Morton presents the first book-length account of the presence of a poet's work in works of prose fiction. As well as shedding new light on the poems of Tennyson and their reception history, Morton covers a wide variety of novelists including Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, and Andrew O'Hagan, offering a fresh look at their approach to writing. Morton shows how Tennyson's poetry, despite its frequent depreciation by critics, has survived as a vivifying presence in the novel from the Victorian period to the present day.

Trollope is usually seen as a faithful mirror of Victorian England, both in providing details of contemporary life and in endorsing the moral attitudes and certainties of the period. His powers of empathy make his characters convincing and knowable. Yet the Victorians restricted women to the house and severely limited their rights and opportunities. This text examines the conundrum of how a great novelist could both accept the conventional values of the time and yet be able to see and sympathise with the impossible situations that Victorian women often found themselves. The author shows the individuality of Trollope's women: even conventional Angel in the House heroines, like the eponymous Rachel Ray and Mary Lowther in "The Vicar of Bullhampton", can surprise us at times. More tellingly, he cannot help giving some of his less angelic characters, such as the vivacious Lizzie Eustace in "The Eustace Diamonds" and the dauntless Mrs Hurtle in "The Way We Live Now". His range extends beyond simple romance to the realistic handling of marriages, both happy and unhappy, and to the treatment of bigamy and scandal. He shows men and women getting on together as well as fighting bitterly. Nor are Trollope's novels as devoid of sex as has often been thought. Not only are hidden jokes made about the subject, men in the novels clearly think about women's bodies - something that women reciprocate. While in his plots and in his authorial asides, Trollope usually supports conventional Victorian attitudes, in his handling of women he shows himself capable of a real understanding of their restrictions and problems: the imperative to catch a husband; women's powerlessness (as experienced by Emily Trevelyan in "He Knew He Was Right" where a marriage failed; and the double standards applied to them throughout their lives.

"Corpus Linguistics and The Study of Literature" provides a theoretical introduction to corpus stylistics and also demonstrates its application by presenting corpus stylistic analyses of literary texts and corpora. The first part of the book addresses theoretical issues such as the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in corpus linguistic analyses, criteria for the evaluation of results from corpus linguistic analyses and also discusses units of meaning in language. The second part of the book takes this theory and applies it to "Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen and to two corpora consisting of: Austen's six novels; and texts that are contemporary with Austen. The analyses demonstrate the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools can extract new critical angles. This book will be a key read for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates working in corpus linguistics and in stylistics on linguistics and language studies courses. The editorial board includes: Paul Baker (Lancaster), Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Dominique Maingueneau (Paris XII), Christian Mair (Freiburg), Alan Partington (Bologna), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Siena and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster), and Feng Zhiwei (Beijing). "The Corpus and Discourse" series consists of two strands. The first, "Research in Corpus and Discourse", features innovative contributions to various aspects of corpus linguistics and a wide range of applications, from language technology via the teaching of a second language to a history of mentalities. The second strand, "Studies in Corpus and Discourse", is comprised of key texts bridging the gap between social studies and linguistics. Although equally academically rigorous, this strand will be aimed at a wider audience of academics and postgraduate students working in both disciplines.

The metaphor of life as prison obsessed Edith Wharton, and, consequently, the theme of imprisonment appears in most of her 86 short stories. In the last several decades, critical studies of Wharton's fiction have focused on this theme of imprisonment, but invariably it is related to biographical considerations. This study, however, is not concerned with such insights and influences; rather, it concentrates on Wharton's skill as a craftsman in consciously and carefully fitting her narrative techniques to the imprisonment theme. Representative tales from Wharton's early period (1891-1904), her major phase (1905-1919), and her later years (1926-1937) have been examined and divided into four categories: individuals trapped by love and marriage, men and women imprisoned by the dictates of society, human beings victimized by the demands of art and morality, and persons paralyzed by fear of the supernatural.

This book contributes significantly to Law and Literature studies. Arguing for the political relevance of their work, the editors open the volume with an introduction that summarizes topical developments in law enforcement and penal politics including the 'prisonization' of American society and popular support for « no tolerance approaches to crime. The fourteen essays that follow - six on trials and eight on prisons - discuss subjects ranging from the political ramifications of Captain Kidd's trials for piracy to a reading of South African prison memoirs and include treatments of prison films, courtroom dramas and works by Dickens, Shakespeare and Scott. The volume demonstrates powerfully how concepts of criminality are constructed and how literature participates in, and sometimes enhances, general discursive traditions of adversarial litigation and carcerality.

During the short history of the United States, war has marked the stages of the nation's journey, and imaginative literature has reflected and shaped an understanding of that journey. To study the war literature of the United States, then, is to study not only the representation of individuals at war but also creative renderings of the American experience. Until now, the treatment of American war literature has been handicapped by the absence of a single-source reference that can be the foundation for significant inquiry. This book addresses that need by presenting succinct, authoritative entries on the major writers and texts that have imaginatively represented the American experience of war.

This reference establishes the range and character of a significant body of work never before treated so comprehensively. It includes critical commentary on the novels, poems, nonfiction prose, and plays that reflect major conflicts from before the Revolutionary War through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It also includes topical entries that survey the literature of America's major wars as well as such subjects as Indian captivity narratives, women's diaries of the Civil War, the literature of the Spanish-American War, and African American war literature. Entries are written by expert contributors and conclude with brief bibliographies, while the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

This innovative study examines a range of canonical and non-canonical materials to open a new narrative on the mutually illuminating interchange between Romantic literature and philological theory in the late-18th and early 19th centuries. Arguing that philology can no longer be treated as something that did not happen to Romantic authors, this book undertakes a substantial revision of our understanding of the intellectual and political contexts that helped determine the Romantic consciousness.

This is the second instalment of Browning's great murder-story set in the Italy of the 1690s, The Ring and the Book, a poem which Henry James called a 'monstrous magnificence'. Here Browning lets the central characters of his poem - the corrupt aristocrat and murderer Franceschini, his victim, and her rescuer - tell the story in their own words.

This book explores the urban, cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Lucknow, which was the center of a flourishing Indo-Islamic culture. Ruth Vanita analyzes Rekhti, a type of Urdu poetry distinguished by a female speaker and a focus on women's lives, and shows how it became a catalyst for the transformation of the ghazal.

This book builds on a critical and scholarly revival of interest in Collins. Baker draws upon biographical revelations and the recent publication of Collins's letters to provide a unique insight into both the man and the writer. The volume will appeal to all students of Collins and those with an interest in the life of Nineteenth-century England.

The public debate on abortion stretches back much further than Roe v. Wade, to long before the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" were ever invented. Yet the ways Americans discussed abortion in the early decades of the twentieth century had little in common with our now-entrenched debates about personal responsibility and individual autonomy. Abortion in the American Imagination returns to the moment when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. What was once a topic avoided by polite society, only discussed in vague euphemisms behind closed doors, suddenly became open to vigorous public debate as it was represented everywhere from sensationalistic melodramas to treatises on social reform. Literary scholar and cultural historian Karen Weingarten shows how these discussions were remarkably fluid and far-ranging, touching upon issues of eugenics, economics, race, and gender roles. Weingarten traces the discourses on abortion across a wide array of media, putting fiction by canonical writers like William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, and Langston Hughes into conversation with the era's films, newspaper articles, and activist rhetoric. By doing so, she exposes not only the ways that public perceptions of abortion changed over the course of the twentieth century, but also the ways in which these abortion debates shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.