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" --

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.

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.

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.

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.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's "lines on virtue" written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's "Asolando" (1889). This Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; followed by courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including "Aurora Leigh" and "Men and Women" (1845-61); and concluding with Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. This book provides not only precise dating but also in-depth information on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

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.

Criticism has largely emphasized the private meaning of "Romantic Satanism", treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.

Considers the Indian periodical press as a key forum for the production of nationalist rhetoric. It argues that between the 1870s and 1910, the press was the place in which the notion of 'the public' circulated and where an expansive middle class, and even larger reading audience, was persuaded into believing it had force.

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.

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.

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.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the most widely read novels of all time. Its two central characters, the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the being he creates, have gained mythic status in their own right. Engaging with the nove

This title features new scholarship informed by both historicist and metaphysical approaches, offering original readings of the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth and their reception. The history of responses to the works of William Wordsworth and William Blake can be divided into those who have tried to enact their poetry, and those who have tried to categorize it. The 'enactors' have themselves often been artists (Felicia Hemans, the pre-Raphaelites, William Hale White, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg); the 'categorizers' - those who have attempted to systematize, theologize, and more recently historicize the poetry - have tended to be academics. The two types of response provide a polarity of the sort that Blake termed 'producers and devourers'. The reception of the two poets is riven by this conflict which provokes the strongest feeling. But which side is right? In addressing this question, Jonathan Roberts takes a leaf from Blake's own book and interrelates the two sides dialectically. Rather than denigrating metaphysical responses in the face of historicist responses, or vice versa, this book argues that not only are both valid, but the conflict between them is staged in the poetry of both Blake and Wordsworth, who press their readers into exploring that relationship. This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

"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.

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.

A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.

This timely anthology offers a broad selection of critical texts--introductions, prefaces, periodical essays, literary reviews--written by women of the Romantic era. The collection offers fuel for some of the most topical debates in British Romantic period studies including professionalism, nationalism and the literary canon.

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.

It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within nineteenth-century German sexology. But how were the 'German ideas' translated and transmitted into English culture? This study provides an examination of the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries.

"This collection by leading scholars in the field provides a fascinating and ground-breaking introduction to current research in Irish Romantic studies. It proves the international scope and aesthetic appeal of Irish writing in this period, and shows the importance of Ireland to wider currents in Romanticism"--

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.

Throughout George Eliot's fiction, not only do a remarkable number of her characters act under the influence of unwise consumption of alcohol and opium, but drugs also recur often as metaphors and allusions. Together, they create an extensive pattern of drug/disease references that represent socio-political problems as diseases in a social body and solutions to those problems (especially solutions that depend on some kind of written language) as volatile remedies that retain the potential to either kill or cure.