Literature in English is hardly ever entirely in English. Contact with other languages takes place, for example, whenever foreign languages are introduced, or if a native style is self-consciously developed, or when aspects of English are remade in the image of another language. Since the Renaissance, Latin and Greek have been an important presence in British poetry and prose. This is partly because of the importance of the ideals and ideologies founded and elaborated on Roman and Greek models. Latin quotations and latinate English have always been ways to represent, scrutinize, or satirize the influential values associated with Rome. The importance of Latin and Greek is also due to the fact that they have helped to form and define a variety of British social groups. Lawyers, Catholics, and British gentlemen invested in Latin as one source of their distinction from non-professionals, from Protestants, and from the unleisured. British attitudes toward Greek and Latin have been highly charged because the animus that existed between groups has also been directed toward these languages themselves. English Literature and Ancient Languages is a study of literary uses of language contact, of English literature in conjunction with Latin and Greek. While the book's emphasis is literary, that is formal and verbal, its goal is to discover how social interests and cultural ideas are, and are not, mediated through language.

Exploring the work of William Blake within the context of Methodism - the largest 'dissenting' religious group during his lifetime - this book contributes to ongoing critical debates surrounding Blake's religious affinities by suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, Blake held sympathies with certain aspects of Methodism.

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres. This book is an examination of the literary, social, and political significance of the lives and writings of aristocratic women in the mid-Victorian period.

This is a concise, readable and comprehensive introduction to Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula" (1897) for undergraduates. "Dracula" (1897) is one of the most commonly studied gothic novels and has been hugely influential through adaptations in fiction, on stage and in cinema. Offering an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, this book introduces its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text.It is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, setting "Dracula" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. It also includes an introduction to its substantial history as an adapted text on stage and screen focusing on the portrayal of the vampire from "Nosferatu" to "Interview with a Vampire". It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

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.

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.

Readers of Emily Bronte's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary "mystic of the moors". Rather than seeking to resolve this matter, Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions, conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves. Rejecting the idea that a single, coherent set of religious doctrines are to be found in Bronte's work, this book argues that Wuthering Heights and the poems dramatise individual experiences of faith in the context of a world in which such faith is always conflicted, always threatened. Bronte's work dramatises the experience of imaginative faith that is always contested by the presence of other voices, other worldviews. Her characters cling to visionary faith in the face of death and mortality, awaiting and anticipating a final vindication, an eschatological fulfilment that always lies in a future beyond the scope of the text.

William Blake is one of the most important influences on twentieth-century literature. This study will ask why he is a figure central to the Modernist re-definition of past art. He also appears to be an acceptable sage for postmodernists, he can be associated with an opposition to authority without imposing one version of his own mythology.

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.

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

Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformed into repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society. Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses, let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This book analyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.

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.

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.

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

Terror, dread, and violence against civilian populations constitute a true predicament of our contemporary political world. Authoritarian governments develop methods to capitalize on the arts in support of terror, where violence and trauma provoke more of the same in a vicious circle. This book argues that the arts--from film and literature to painting and comics--offers qualitatively different readings of terror and trauma, readings that endeavor to resist the exploitation and perpetuation of violence. The contributors suggest that political inquiry into the phenomenon of terror may benefit profoundly by developing non-reductive ways of reading the arts.

Covering a diverse range of figures and issues from Jonathan Swifts pornographic poetry to Oscar Wildes famous cello-shaped coat this book collapses Irish studies into the critical perspective of disability studies: linking 'Irishness' and 'disability' together allows the emergence of a new critical perspective, an Irish disability studies.

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.

Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present examines representations of war in literature, film, photography, memorials, and the popular press. The volume breaks new ground in cutting across disciplinary boundaries and offering case studies on a wide variety of fields of vision and action, and types of conflict: from civil wars in the USA, Spain, Russia and the Congo to recent western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of World War Two, Representing Wars emphasises idiosyncratic and non-western perspectives - specifically those of Japanese writers Hayashi and Ooka. A central concern of the thirteen contributors has been to investigate the ethical and ideological implications of specific representational choices. Contributors are: Claire Bowen, Catherine Ann Collins, Marie-France Courriol, Eliane Elmaleh, Teresa Gibert, William Gleeson, Catherine Hoffmann, Sandrine Lascaux, Christopher Lloyd, Monica Michlin, Guillaume Muller, Misako Nemoto, Clement Sigalas.

Wilkie Collins is the only leading Victorian novelist whose letters have not been published. This two-volume edition, edited by William Baker and William Clarke, fills a gaping hole in any assessment of one of the nineteenth century's most loved novelists. It is also extremely timely. Two recent biographies have re-assessed his private life and his literary achievements. His best-known novels, The Women in White and The Moonstone, continue to feature on television, and most of his thirty-odd novels are still in print. This authorised edition reproduces his selection of around 700 key letters of the 2,000 known to be in existence, some recently discovered. Summaries and sources of the remaining letters are provided in an appendix.

"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.

Recent politically based works on the vampire novel have been orientated towards Irish or postcolonial contexts. In this work Matthew Gibson couches the work of Merimee, Polidori, Le Fanu, Stoker and Verne in the immediate and specific context in which their works were written - namely the right response to the Balkan, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian politics. While tracing the views and opinions of the writers themselves, he also analyzes their works to reveal that the vampire acts as an allegory of the Near East through which they suggest (rather than avow) frequently unorthodox views, which are a challenge to critics who profess the 'orientalism' argument popular today.

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.

According to Adam Smith, vanity is a vice that contains a promise: a vain person is much more likely than a person with low self-esteem to accomplish great things. Problematic as it may be from a moral perspective, vanity makes a person more likely to succeed in business, politics and other public pursuits. "The great secret of education," Smith writes, "is to direct vanity to proper objects:" this peculiar vice can serve as a stepping-stone to virtue. How can this transformation be accomplished and what might go wrong along the way? What exactly is vanity and how does it factor into our personal and professional lives, for better and for worse? This book brings Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments into conversation with William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair to offer an analysis of vanity and the objects (proper and otherwise) to which it may be directed. Leading the way through the literary case study presented here is Becky Sharp, the ambitious and cunning protagonist of Thackeray's novel. Becky is joined by a number of other 19th Century literary heroines - drawn from the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot - whose feminine (and feminist) perspectives complement Smith's astute observations and complicate his account of vanity. The fictional characters featured in this volume enrich and deepen our understanding of Smith's work and disclose parts of our own experience in a fresh way, revealing the dark and at times ridiculous aspects of life in Vanity Fair, today as in the past.

"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" --

Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long-lasting; and Beer demonstrates in this book that none of his work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind, and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking. The insights that emerge in this collection are of absorbing interest, showing the efforts of a pioneer to reconcile traditional wisdom, both inside and outside orthodox Christianity, with the questions that were becoming evident to a sensitive enquirer.