Using a wealth of diverse source material this book comprises an innovative critical study which, for the first time, examines Scott through the filter of his female contemporaries. It not only provides thought-provoking ideas about their handling of, for example, the love-plot, but also produces a different, more sombre Scott.

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.

"Henry James' Narrative Technique "situates Henry James' famous method within an emerging modernist tradition with roots in philosophical debates between rationalism and empiricism. This cogent study considers James' works in the context of nineteenth-century thought on consciousness, perception, and cognition. Kristin Boudreau makes the compelling argument that these philosophical discussions influenced James' depictions of consciousness and are integral to his narrative technique.

This is an introductory portrait of Thackeray the writer, focusing on his philosophy and religion, relations with women, his illustrations, his narrative strategies, and the demands his texts make on modern readers. Suggests themes and ways to read sample books rather than offering a comprehensive life or critical survey.

Black Neo-Victoriana is the first book-length study on contemporary re-imaginations of Blackness in the long nineteenth century. Located at the intersections of postcolonial studies, Black studies, and neo-Victorian criticism, this interdisciplinary collection engages with the global trend to reimagine and rewrite Black Victorian subjectivities that have been continually marginalised in both historical and cultural discourses. Contributions cover a range of media, from novels and drama to film, television and material culture, and draw upon cultural formations such as Black fandom, Black dandyism, or steamfunk. The book evidences how neo-Victorian studies benefits from reading re-imaginations of the long nineteenth century vis-a-vis Black epistemologies, which unhinge neo-Victorianism's dominant spatial and temporal axes and reroute them to conceive of the (neo-)Victorian through Blackness.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the legends of the British Isles and how Blake applied these in his extraordinary prophetic histories of the giant Albion, revitalising myths of the Druids and Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christ to Albion.

"At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death" --

Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organised by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, "Dixie"; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasising the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection-before apples turned to ashes in their mouths-many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.

Gustave Flaubert is probably the most famous novelist of nineteenth-century France, and his best known work, "Madame Bovary, " is read in numerous comparative literature and French courses. His fiction set the standard to which other authors turned to learn their craft, and his cult of art and his unrelenting search for stylistic perfection inspired many later writers, such as Maupassant, Proust, Conrad, Faulkner, and Joyce. His denunciation of materialistic, corrupt society; his fascination with altered states of consciousness; his oscillation between metaphysical longings and a radical nihilism; and his deep-seated mistrust of the adequacy of words themselves anticipate the works of contemporary authors. This reference is a convenient guide to his life and writings.

Included in this volume are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on Flaubert's individual works and major characters; historical persons and events that shaped his life; the themes that run throughout his writings; the critical approaches employed by scholars studying his works; and related topics of interest. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and most close with a brief bibliography. All of his major works are treated at length, and the volume mentions nearly every unpublished project of his that has a title. The book concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies.

The summer of 1830 stirred revolutionary desires in young hearts across Europe. More than a generation of war and political instability had failed to dampen the fervor still felt from the French Revolution. In England the Cambridge Apostles took up the cause of the Spanish emigres so movingly visible in London where they had sought refuge from the tyranny of Ferdinand VII and his suppression of constitutional rights. The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles has always captured our imaginations. Its blend of idealism and daring, of theory and practice, of thought and energy, seems perfectly to fulfill the principles the Apostles steadfastly espoused, a combination of faith and works. The episodes comprised in most accounts of the expedition are symbolic and filled with intrigue: secret meetings, assumed names, hidden messages, contraband, narrow escapes from the authorities, treachery, and finally a bloody execution on the beach at Malaga. A host of newly-discovered documents now enable us to re-examine one of the most intriguing events in British intellectual history.

This innovative book reveals the full extent of electricity's significance in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century culture. Ranging across a vast array of materials, Sam Halliday shows how electricity functioned as both a means of representing "other" things--from love and solidarity to embodiment and temporality--and as an object of representation in its own right. As well as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and James, the book considers other major American writers such as Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Henry Adams; English writers such as Hardy and Kipling; and a galaxy of scientists and social commentators, including mesmerists, physicians, conspiracy theorists, psychologists and theologians.

Jane Austen's satirical classical novels have made a lasting contribution to English literature and first gave the novel its distinctly modern character with the treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. Her works, such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma andMansfield Park, remain as popular today as they ever have been, both in book form and a screen adaptations. The Preface Books series approaches the work of Jane Austen from a particular perspective which, by introducing the writer via a biographical sketch and a survey of her cultural and social context, encourages readers to understand her work in the period and style it was written. Christopher Gillie's A Preface to Austen looks at Austen's life and literary background and their effect on her work. Using biographical information, it clearly sets her writing firmly in the context of her times and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the works of Austen.

Probably the most famous of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times. John Purkis provides an outline of Wordsworth's life and cultural background and their effect on his work, and examines his verse, from the earliest school poems to the final years.

A Preface to Hardy remains the best introduction to one of the most important and popular writers in English literature. The first section concentrates on Hardy the man and outlines the intellectual and cultural context in which he lived. The author then moves on to examine a wide range of Hardy's work, with particular reference to The Mayor of Casterbridge. There is new material on Hardy's short stories and their relation to the major novels, and on The Dynasts, which accompanies a study of a range of Hardy's other poetry.

Scholarship on Ralph Waldo Emerson has expanded considerably during the past decade. Since Emerson is the subject of historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, there is a need for an efficient and effective means to access information within an extraordinary range of critical approaches and perspectives. This bibliography lists and annotates writings about Emerson published in English between 1980 and 1991, and complements earlier Emerson bibliographies.

Because the response to Emerson has evolved greatly over the years, the contents of this bibliography are arranged in chronological order. This arrangement allows the user to trace the progression of certain critical approaches to Emerson and to follow the development of critics who have made numerous contributions to Emerson scholarship. Each chapter is devoted to a particular year. Within each chapter, entries begin with book publications arranged alphabetically by author, followed by annual journals alphabetized by journal title and journal articles arranged by date of publication. A detailed index locates works by subject, author, and title.

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

Presents all known poems by Shelley and offers significant new datings and contextual exposition of the major works and there are also comprehensive treatments of the best known shorter poems. All poems are fully annotated and arranged in chronological order and makes use of the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodlean Library and draws on the substantial new research which has appeared over the last 10 years. KEY TOPICS: Including Prometheus Unbound, Laon and Cythna, Julian and Maddalo, The Cenci, Shelley's translations from the Greek, including his highly original translation of Euripides' The Cyclops, as well as some of Shelley's best known shorter poems, such as 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills' and 'Ozymandias' MARKET: For readers or scholars interested in Shelley's poetry.

In a work that will be of interest to students and scholars of American Literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the History of Ideas,and Religious Studies, Brad Bannon examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards. A closer look at Coleridge's response to Edwards clarifies the important influence that both thinkers had on seminal works of the nineteenth century, ranging from the antebellum period to the aftermath of the American Civil War-from Poe's fiction and Emerson's essays to Melville's Billy Budd and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Similarly, Coleridge's early espousal of an abolitionist theology that had evolved from Edwards and been shaped by John Woolman and Olaudah Equiano sheds light on the way that American Romantics later worked to affirm a philosophy of supernatural self-determination. Ultimately, what Coleridge offered the American Romantics was a supernatural modification of Edwards' theological determinism, a compromise that provided Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers with an acceptable extension of an essentially Calvinist theology. Indeed, a thoroughgoing skepticism with respect to salvation, as well as a faith in the absolute inscrutability of Providence, led both the Transcendentalists and the Dark Romantics to speculate freely on the possibility of supernatural self-determination while doubting that anything other than God, or nature, could harness the power of causation.

Women, Crime and Language examines the relationships between discourses of crime and gender: how women are represented in fiction and reportage, and how they have represented themselves. Frances Gray explores a number of high-profile cases from the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 to the Children's Home scandals of the present day, in which women have been featured as victims, perpetrators or investigators. The author tracks the representation of women through detective stories, plays and novels.

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the specter of the lost child (as in the rumor that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham, and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy's poetry.

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.

"Romanticism and Form" gives a snapshot of what and where the recent revival of formalism in Romantic Studies is up to, offering new analyses of canonical texts, contextualisations of Romantic forms in relation to war, nationalism, propaganda and empire, reassessments of neglected and marginalised writers and new explorations of the relationship between form and reader. The volume showcases a range of new approaches to form that are distanced from New Criticism but informed by deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, theology and new technology.

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

The Apocalypse of John is perhaps the most alluring and dangerous text in any scripture. This study looks at English responses to it in political pamphlets and scholarly exegesis, in poetry and preaching and visual art. Those who set out to find enduring meaning in the book failed. Yet in the post-Christian re-writings of Revelation by Shelley and Blake, John's own dynamic of unveiling comes to life, subverting the structures of power and reading built on the visions of Patmos.