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.

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.

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.

This book conveys Thackeray's development as a novelist, lecturer in Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal - a development especially growing out of the achievement of Vanity Fair , where he has so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces defining the human existence that he and his readers shared. Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied work and activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic of human life.

Moby-Dick looms large - gargantuan in size, themes, symbols, and influence. Its deep dives, comedic interludes, adventurous journey, and surface effects demand a new approach. Instead of a traditional academic analysis, Dive Deeper grapples in novel fashion with this classic work. For each of the originals 135 chapters (along with Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue), Dive Deeper has a corresponding brief chapter relating to themes and issues in the original. This permits Dive Deeper to follow the flow of the original and to bring forth new appreciation for the novel, its characters, and its readers. At once creative and informative, Dive Deeper captures the up and down history of the novel, from its original reception to its resurrection in the 1890s, to its ecoming the central work in the canon of American literature in the 1930s. Great books such as Moby-Dick live outside the confines of libraries. They occupy a central place in popular culture. Thus, Dive Deeper tracks the novel as it appears in various motion pictures (more than five major ones to date), comic routines and jokes, paintings, novels, songs (from rock to classical to rap), and in other cultural forms. In the process, Dive Deeper charts how, and why, this novel about a whale and its pursuer has captivated generations of American readers. And why it continues to do so today. Dive Deeper, then, is a creative and original way of approaching a great novel. Readers will gain information and a deeper understanding of an American classic and its place in popular culture.

"Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend "explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned--if not notorious--for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time. In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera "Salome" and Robert Ross's edition of "De Profundi." With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings. This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde's value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the subject of spectacular violence in British Romantic literature and print culture. It looks at the impact and influence of a series of catastrophically violent events: the transatlantic slave trade; the American war of Independence and the 'Indian' problem; the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars; the Irish rebellion of 1798; and a series of riots and 'disturbances' stretching from the Gordon riots of 1780 to the Reform Bill riots of 1831.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens fromSesame and Lilies was read as alocus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.

This is an exploration of new aspects of Blake's work using the concept of incarnation and drawing on theories of contemporary digital media. Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative. Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and images, the incarnation of words in material books and their copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and the incarnation of spirit in matter.

This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth's sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the study of one of the most important Victorian novelists. Its editors, Robert L. Patten and John Bowen, are leading authorities on Dickens and the international team of contributors they have assembled contains some of the most exciting critics of nineteenth-century fiction writing today. The book covers the whole range of Dickens's writing and criticism about it, including biographical, theoretical and historical approaches. It is based on up-to-the-minute research and written in a lively and engaging way, and will be essential reading for all students and scholars of this canonical writer.

This English translation of De Quilmes a Hyde Park: Las fronteras culturales en la vida y la obra de W. H. Hudson, which won the 2001 Annual Prize in Literature of Uruguay, analyzes how the richness of Hudson's work is linked to the overlapping of several cultures in his life. His work and life developed in the opposition of Romanticism to Enlightenment, wavering between literature and science. Combining biographical details with analysis of his philosophy and works, the study follows Hudson's life from his childhood on a cattle farm in Argentina to his emigration to England in 1870, including the years he fought on the frontier between whites and indigenous populations and the years he spent traveling abroad. The study concludes with a bibliography of Hudson's books, poems, posthumously published works, and translations into Spanish, as well as critical studies of Hudson.

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.

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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

A renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and elan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media. Gay's scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all? Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no "single basket" to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in "families," whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.