The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the "Home Tour," with travelers drawn to Scotland, the less explored regions of England and North Wales, and, increasingly, to Ireland. Although an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1800, Ireland represented for many travellers a worryingly unknown entity, politically intractable and unstable, devoutly Catholic, and economically deprived. This book examines British responses to the "Sister Isle" throughout a period of significant cultural and historical change, and examines the varied means through which Ireland was represented for a predominantly British audience.

The South has a rich cultural legacy and that of Louisiana is especially strong and diverse. Despite its similarities with the rest of the South, Louisiana has a distinct cultural identity rooted in the colonial impulses of France and Spain, the evolution of gender roles, the importance of religion, and the dramatic shift in racial politics after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps because of its diversity, it has inspired numerous writers, some of whom have contributed greatly to American literature. This book explores the influences at work on Louisiana writers and those writing about Louisiana from the end of the Civil War through World War II.

These writers reflect the effects of Louisiana's culture, politics, and colonial heritage. Such writers as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lyle Saxon, and George Washington Cable characterize the racial caste system, pointing out the flaws in its construction and its effects on relationships. Ruth McEnery Stuart, Kate Chopin, and Sallie Rhett Roman depict the lives of women in Louisiana and their struggles when taking on nontraditional roles. And William Faulkner and Arna Bontemps draw upon narrative and folk traditions, which provide the foundations for their works. Chapters are grouped in sections devoted to three of the broadest influences on writers of the era: women, work, and culture during Reconstruction; the impact of Modernism; and issues of race and class.

Charting a pervasive paradigm shift, Ashton Nichols chronicles the revolutionary turn away from the view of "Nature" as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic "nature" characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship, this book draws new conclusions about twenty-first century ideas of nature.

.

An anthology of both familiar and previously unavailable primary texts that illuminate the world of nineteenth-century ideas. An expert team introduce and annotate a range of original social, cultural, political and historical documents necessary for contextualising key literary texts from the Victorian period.

"This book narrates the first national celebration of united Italy, the Sixth Centenary of Dante Alighieri in May 1865. Denominated alternatively as a national, European, and secular festa, the affair materialized as an eclectic Italian monument with extraordinary political, social and cultural significance. The Centenary was a platform upon which an alternative definition of Italian identity emerged, one based on a Florentine cultural nationalism that opposed the Savoyard territorial nationalism. An stunningly popular event celebrated throughout Italian civil society, the festa was conceived, organized, and strategically promoted from a municipal center, the city of Florence. Its Florentine organizers successfully wrote the story of the Centenary as a parable of the Florentine son, Dante, who fathered the Italian nation as well as king Victor Emmanuel himself"--

Combining a unique overview of metropolitan visual culture with detailed textual analysis, this interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between the two cities which Londoners inhabited: the physical spaces of the metropolis, whose socially stratified and gendered topography was shaped by consumer culture and unregulated capitalism and an imaginary 'London', an 'Unreal City' which reflected and influenced their understanding of, and actions in, the 'real' environment. MARKET 1: Scholars, graduate and undergraduate student in Literary Studies; Victorian Studies MARKET 2: General reader and students/scholars of Cultural Studies; Art History; Urban and Social History; Visual Culture; Gender Studies; British Histor y

This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies. The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the body, monstrosity, metaphor, motherhood and nationality - to open up new critical directions.

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be an influential poet of the early 20th century. In this study Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats' significance as founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the 20th century.

Defining narrativity as the enabling force of narrative, this is the first full-length exploration of the concept in fiction in English. It develops the notion of a "logic of narrativity," and by this means tries to contribute a new critical strategy to the field of narrative theory. The book also takes issue with a number of critical approaches that have in recent years acquired near-orthodox status in the matter of textual interpretation. Most prominent among these approaches are deconstruction and a particular form of Marxist criticism. The author's own theoretical claims are substantiated by readings of major twentieth-century novels by Conrad, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Arthur Koestler, and the book concludes with an analysis of an earlier narrative, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, which illustrates the wider premises of the theory and its applications.

Emily Shore's journal is the unique self-representation of a prodigious young Victorian woman. From July 5, 1831, at the age of eleven, until June 24, 1839, two weeks before her death from consumption, Margaret Emily Shore recorded her reactions to the world around her. She wrote of political issues, natural history, her progress as a scholar and scientist, and the worlds of art and literature. In her brief life, this remarkable young woman also produced, but did not publish, three novels, three books of poetry, and histories of the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans, and she published several essays on birds. Written in an authoritative voice more often associated with men of her time, her journal reveals her to be well versed in the life of an early Victorian woman.

Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric" aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson. This major new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of Transcendentalism. Diverting her ancestors' fervent religion into the celebration of solitude, nature, and imagination, she explored new ground as a woman writer and crucially set the terms for her nephew's thought.

This book examines three examples of late nineteenth-century Japanese adaptations of Western literature: a biography of Ulysses S. Grant recasting him as a Japanese warrior, a Victorian novel reset as oral performance, and an American melodrama redone as a serialized novel promoting the reform of Japanese theater. Miller argues that adaptation (hon’an ) was a valid form of contemporary Japanese translation that fostered creative appropriation across genres and among a diverse group of writers and artists.

Providing an access to the main facts of Edgar Allan Poe's life and career, this work should be of service to the student, scholar or general reader who wishes to check a point quickly without referring to the detailed narratives offered by the standard biographies. The chronology includes details of Poe's works, both of those published in his lifetime and those which appeared posthumously. There is a full index of persons, places and works referred to. In this work, the author offers a chronology of Poe which takes into account the latest research into his life and times, and provides an insight into the background, life and work of this literary figure.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

In "Romanticism and Pleasure" nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. Richard Sha, Denise Gigante, and Joel Faflak, among others, make a timely contribution to recent debates about issues of pleasure, taste, and appetite by looking anew at the work of figures such as Byron, Coleridge, and Austen.

"Blake's Night Thoughts" discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking "night" as the breakdown of rational progressive thought and of thought based on concepts of identity, the book reads the lyric poetry, some Prophetic works, including a chapter on "The Four Zoas," the illustrations to Young, and Dante, and looks at Blake's writing of madness.

Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint.
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

Sinister histories is the first book to offer a detailed exploration of the Gothic's response to Enlightenment historiography. It uncovers hitherto-neglected relationships between fiction and prominent works of eighteenth-century history, locating the Gothic novel in a range of new interdisciplinary contexts. Drawing on ideas from literary studies, history, politics and philosophy, the book demonstrates the extent to which historical works influenced and shaped Gothic fiction from the 1760s to the early nineteenth century. Through a series of detailed readings of texts from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), this book offers an alternative account of the Gothic's development and a sustained revaluation of the creative legacies of the French Revolution. -- .

Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing, 1792-1897 revises current understandings of 19th Century representations of prostitution, female sexuality, and the "rights of women" debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. Roxanne Eberle considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.

In this book White "traces the influence of both the comedies and tragedies {of Shakespeare} on Keats's work." (Choice)

This comprehensive guide to the poetry and letters of John Keats offers a highly readable and detailed textual analysis of the themes and techniques of his work. Blades assesses all the major writing - including the narratives and the great odes - and goes on to examine the context of the verse through a survey of the poet's letters and an examination of the key features of nineteenth century Romanticism. This lively and imaginative study concludes with a discussion of some of the most influential critical responses to Keats's work.

The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

This bundle brings together 29 prominent works examining and exploring areas of 19th literature. The collection includes volumes on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, The Brontes, Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad, as well as a critical look at key issues during this time, including Darwinism, orientalism, 19th century Romanticism, and scientific advancement during the period. The collection focuses on a variety of regions including Victorian England, Russia and the US, and explores the literary styles of the period from the provincial and comedic novel to new explorations of the psyche in the literature, as well as the industrial, technological and scientific advancements of the period. This comprehensive collection provides an essential and complete look at literature during the nineteenth century, and will be a useful and fascinating collection for any students of literature and history in particular those studying the Victorian period.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.