Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian science and religion, nineteenth-century depictions of bodies in suspended animation are read as manifestations of broader concerns about the unknowable in Anne C. McCarthy's Awful Parenthesis. Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, McCarthy shares important insights into the nineteenth-century fascination with the sublime. Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.

Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.

Women and Empire, 1750-1939: Primary Sources on Gender and Anglo-Imperialism functions to extend significantly the range of the History of Feminism series (co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse), bringing together the histories of British and American women's emancipation, represented in earlier sets, into juxtaposition with histories produced by different kinds of imperial and colonial governments. The alignment of writings from a range of Anglo-imperial contexts reveals the overlapping histories and problems, while foregrounding cultural specificities and contextual inflections of imperialism. The volumes focus on countries, regions, or continents formerly colonized (in part) by Britain: Volume I: Australia Volume II: New Zealand Volume III: Africa Volume IV: India Volume V: Canada Perhaps the most novel aspect of this collection is its capacity to highlight the common aspects of the functions of empire in their impact on women and their production of gender, and conversely, to demonstrate the actual specificity of particular regional manifestations. Concerning questions of power, gender, class and race, this new Routledge-Edition Synapse Major Work will be of particular interest to scholars and students of imperialism, colonization, women's history, and women's writing.

The German Romantics were fascinated by the Orient and its potential to inspire poetic creation. E.T.A. Hoffmann was no exception: across the wide range of his work as an author, composer, and music critic, the Orient is a persistent topic. In particular, Hoffmann creatively absorbed the influence of the imagined Orient - its popular European reception - on German literature, music, and scholarship. Joanna Neilly's study considers for the first time the breadth and nuance of Hoffmann's particular brand of orientalism, examining the significance of his oriental characters and themes for a new understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production. A self-reflexive writer who kept a keen eye on contemporary trends, Hoffmann is at the forefront of discussions about cultural transfer and its implications for the modern artist. The German Romantics were fascinated by the Orient and its potential to inspire poetic creation. E.T.A. Hoffmann was no exception: across the wide range of his work as an author, composer, and music critic, the Orient is a persistent topic. In particular, Hoffmann creatively absorbed the influence of the imagined Orient - its popular European reception - on German literature, music, and scholarship. Joanna Neilly's study considers for the first time the breadth and nuance of Hoffmann's particular brand of orientalism, examining the significance of his oriental characters and themes for a new understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production. A self-reflexive writer who kept a keen eye on contemporary trends, Hoffmann is at the forefront of discussions about cultural transfer and its implications for the modern artist.

A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction compares reading to traveling and asserts that the pleasures of novel-reading are similar to the joys of a carriage journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also, however, draw attention to the limits of access often experienced in travel, and she demonstrates the ways in which the realist novel, too, is marked by issues of access both symbolic and material. Limited Access draws on media studies and the history of books and reading to bring to life a history of realism concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Examining works by Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, Takanashi shows how novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess what readers could and could not access. She gives serious attention to marginalized readers figured within the text, highlighting their importance and how writers were concerned about the "limited access" of readers to their novels. Discussions of transport allowed novelists to think about mediation, and, as this study shows, these concerns about access became part of the rise of the novel and the history of realism in a way that literary history has not yet recognized.

Charles Dickens was pre-eminently the novelist of the law, and his lawyers have a hold upon the public imagination far surpassing that of any other author. Dickens method is not the common one of unreasoning denunciation of a class. He knew better than to represent all lawyers as rogues, for he had the advantage of knowing the legal profession from the inside. He never lays down bad law, and he never credits a member of the legal profession with impossible professional conduct.

Student Companion to Herman Melville provides a critical introduction to the life and literary works of Herman Melville, the nineteenth-century American author of Moby-Dick, as well as nine other novels and numerous short stories and poems. In addition to providing an overview of Melville's life in relation to his literary works, the book places his writings within their historical and cultural contexts, and then examines each of his major works fully, at the level of the nonspecialist and generalist reader. The chapters that address major works by Melville feature close readings of the literary texts that include analysis of point of view, setting, plot, characters, symbolism, themes, and historical contexts when appropriate. In addition, the four chapters devoted to individual novels, as well as the chapter on Melville's poetry, feature alternate readings to introduce the reader to postcolonial, feminist, genre, reader response, and deconstructionist approaches to literary criticism. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that includes lists of Melville's published works, biographies, contemporary reviews, and recent critical studies. -Early Narratives, from Typee to White Jacket -Moby Dick -Pierre -The Piazza Tales -Other magazine tales: "I and My Chimney," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and "Israel Potter" -The Confidence-Man -Poetry, including Battle-Pieces and Clarel -Billy Budd

Focusing on the influence of the Oxford Movement on key British poets of the nineteenth-century, this book charts their ruminations on the nature of hunger, poverty and economic injustice. Exploring the works of Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lesa Scholl examines the extent to which these poets - not all of whom were Anglo-Catholics themselves - engaged with the Tractarian social vision when grappling with issues of poverty and economic injustice in and beyond their poetic works. By engaging with economic and cultural history, as well as the sensorial materiality of poetry, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement challenges the assumption that High-Church politics were essentially conservative and removed from the social crises of the Victorian period.

Critical discussions of the Victorian realist novel tend to focus on its vivid representations of everyday life. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real proposes that the genre is founded in desire, moving the novels not towards a shared reality but rather toward distinct fantasies: dreams of the real. Rather than simply redefine Victorian realism or propose a new canon for it, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real argues that the real is inevitably, for the Victorian realist novel, an object of desire: what the novel seeks to capture and represent. A novel's construction of the real is therefore inseparable from its fantasy of the real-a formulation Audrey Jaffe refers to as "realist fantasy." One way in which this simultaneity manifests itself is that the conventions novels frequently use to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies overlap with those each novel uses to create its realist effects. In new readings of Victorian novels (including Eliot's Adam Bede, Dickens's Oliver Twist, Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native, Trollope's Orley Farm, and Wilkie Collins's Armadale), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real demonstrates that one of the signal effects of this overlapping is Victorian realism's construction of the real as an object of readerly desire. Jaffe shows that realism and fantasy in the Victorian realist novel are not opposed, but rather occupy the same space and are shaped by the same conventions. Revisiting and reconsidering key elements of realist novel theory (including metonymy; the insignificant detail; character interiority; the representation of everyday life and the idea of disillusionment), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real also uncovers and anatomizes representational strategies unique to each text.

This book proposes a comparative approach to the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant. It offers an alternative to predominantly novel-centric and Anglo-centric perspectives on literary pre-modernism by investigating a transnational and multilingual connection between genre, theme and theory, i.e., between the modern short story, the supernatural and the problem of knowledge. Incorporating a close analysis of the literary texts into a discussion of their historical context, the book argues that Machado, James and Maupassant explore and reinvent the supernatural short story as a metafictional genre. This modernized and innovative form allows them to challenge the dichotomies and conventions of realist and supernatural fiction, inviting their past and present readers to question common assumptions on reality and literary representation.

Telling in Henry James argues that James's contribution to narrative and narrative theories is a lifelong exploration of how to "tell," but not, as Douglas has it in "The Turn of the Screw" in any "literal, vulgar way." James's fiction offers multiple, and often contradictory, reading (in)directions. Zwinger's overarching contention is that the telling detail is that which cannot be accounted for with any single critical or theoretical lens-that reading James is in some real sense a reading of the disquietingly inassimilable "fictional machinery." The analyses offered by each of the six chapters are grounded in close reading and focused on oddments-textual equivalents to the "particles" James describes as caught in a silken spider web, in a famous analogy used in "The Art of Fiction" to describe the kind of "consciousness" James wants his fiction to present to the reader. Telling in Henry James attends to the sheer fun of James's wit and verbal dexterity, to the cognitive tune-up offered by the complexities and nuances of his precise and rhythmic syntax, and to the complex and contradictory contrapuntal impact of the language on the page, tongue, and ear.

Second only to Shakespeare in terms of performances, Ibsen is performed in almost every culture. Since Ibsen wrote his plays about bourgeois family life in Northern Europe, they have become part of local theatre traditions in cultures as different as the Chinese and the Zimbabwean, the Indian and the Iranian. The result is that today there are incredibly many and different 'Ibsens' around the world. A play like Peer Gynt can be staged on the same continent and in the same year as a politically progressive piece of theatre for development in one place, and as a nationalistic and orientalistic piece of elite spectacle in another. This book charts differences across cultures and political boundaries, and attempts to understand them through an in-depth analysis of their relation to political, social, ideological and economic forces within and outside of the performances themselves.Through the discussion of productions of Ibsen plays on three continents, this book explores how Ibsen is created through practice and his work and reputation maintained as a classics central to the theatrical repertoire.

Exploring the controversial history of an aesthetic - realism - this book examines the role that realism plays in the negotiation of social, political, and material realities from the mid-19th century to the present day. Examining a broad range of literary texts from French, English, Italian, German, and Russian writers, this book provides new insights into how realism engages with themes including capital, social decorum, the law and its politicisation, modern science as a determining factor concerning truth, and the politics of identity. Considering works from Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell, Docherty proposes a new philosophical conception of the politics of realism in an age where politics feels increasingly erratic and fantastical.

In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the ideas and works produced by writers of the American South and the Caribbean. Lowe demonstrates that a tendency to separate literary canons by national and regional boundaries has led critics to ignore deep ties across highly permeable borders. Focusing on writers and literatures from the Deep South and Gulf states in relation to places including Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of southern literature as encompassing the ""circumCaribbean,"" a dynamic framework within which to reconsider literary history, genre, and aesthetics. Considering thematic concerns such as race, migration, forced exile, and colonial and postcolonial identity, Lowe contends that southern literature and culture have always transcended the physical and political boundaries of the American South. Lowe uses cross-cultural readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including William Faulkner, Martin Delany, Zora Neale Hurston, George Lamming, Cristina Garcia, Edouard Glissant, and Madison Smartt Bell, among many others, to make his argument. These literary figures, Lowe argues, help us uncover new ways of thinking about the shared culture of the South and Caribbean while demonstrating that southern literature has roots even farther south than we realize.

This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.

In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from "Beetle Eyes" to the "Shoplifter's Dilemma" and from "Hands in the Muff" to "the Suicide Club." While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives-particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.

From the abolition era to the Civil Rights movement to the age of Obama, the promise of perfectibility and improvement resonates in the story of American democracy. But what exactly does racial "progress" mean, and how do we recognize and achieve it? Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery uncovers a surprising answer to this question in the writings of American authors and activists, both black and white. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson's America to our own posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form-the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors' post-Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary period, Laski recovers late-nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of our most fundamental assumptions about this political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to stutter and even stop, this book invites us to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Wail S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies provides an innovative, interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romantic period with the arts. The encounter was not devoid of tensions and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney's part. This was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and self-construction. While there is now a flourishing body of work on Frances Burney and, more broadly, Romantic women authors, this book concentrates for the first time on the rich artistic and material context that surrounded, supported, and shaped Frances Burney's oeuvre.

Ecce Homo: A Survey in the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865, alarmed some readers and delighted others by its presentation of a humanitarian view of Christ and early Christian history. Victorian Jesus explores the relationship between historian J. R. Seeley and his publisher Alexander Macmillan as they sought to keep Seeley's authorship a secret while also trying to exploit the public interest. Ian Hesketh highlights how Ecce Homo's reception encapsulates how Victorians came to terms with rapidly changing religious views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hesketh critically examines Seeley's career and public image, and the publication and reception of his controversial work. Readers and commentators sought to discover the author's identity in order to uncover the hidden meaning of the book, and this engendered a lively debate about the ethics of anonymous publishing. In Victorian Jesus, Ian Hesketh argues for the centrality of this moment in the history of anonymity in book and periodical publishing throughout the century.