The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel's development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel's formal properties-stylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurative-correlate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?

This groundbreaking book explores the philosophical writing of four female reformers, identifying how their spiritual representations of the feminine attempted to authorize and empower women.  Championing the benefits of well educated Christian women, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Baker Eddy constructed an idiom through which to represent the spiritual equality of the male and female.  Arleen M. Ingham critically investigates how these writers challenged historical identity formations and highlighted the potential for female influence in the private "and "public sphere. 

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since. It is, therefore, also a book about exploration, empire, and the forms of representation that exploration and empire gave rise to-in particular the form we have come to call Romanticism, in which 'Indians' appear everywhere. It is not too much to say that Romanticism would not have taken the form it did without the complex and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readers. Most of the poets of the Romantic canon wrote about them-not least Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; so did many whom we have only recently brought back to attention-including Bowles, Hemans, and Barbauld. Yet Indians' formative role in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism has rarely been considered. Tim Fulford aims to bring that formative role to our attention, to show that the images of native peoples that Romantic writers received from colonial administrators, politicians, explorers, and soldiers helped shape not only these writers' idealizations of 'savages' and tribal life, but also their depictions of nature, religion, and rural society. The romanticization of Indians soon affected the way that real native peoples were treated and described by generations of travellers who had already, before reaching the Canadian forest or the mid-western plains, encountered the literary Indians produced back in Britain. Moreover, in some cases Native Americans, writing in English, turned the romanticization of Indians to their own ends. This book highlights their achievement in doing so-featuring fascinating discussions of several little-known but brilliant Native American writers.

Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors' novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.

Emerson's Sublime Science explores relationships among Emerson's poetics, theory of the sublime, and engagement with electromagnetism. The book illustrates how Davy's chemistry and Faraday's physics revealed to Emerson a sublime universe in which matter is boundless electrical force. It argues that Emerson translated this discovery into a sublime writing style crafted to galvanize readers with the insight that matter is energy. In illuminating Emerson's project, this study also uncovers connections among British Romanticism, American Romanticism, and nineteenth-century science.

This is the first full-length study of Shelley's plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley's role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his "closet dramas" as performable pieces of theatre. With chapters on each of Shelley's dramatic works, the book provides a thorough discussion of the poet's stagecraft, and analyses performances of his plays from the Georgian period to today. In addition, Mulhallen offers details of the productions Shelley saw in England and Italy, many not identified before, as well as a vivid account of the actors and personalities that constituted the theatrical scene of his time. Her research reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice seriously challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist. This study is a major contribution to recent reassessments of Shelley's work and an invaluable resource for anybody interested in Romantic writing and the history of theatre.

Jane Austen's minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen's minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen's minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women's limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.

A Vindication of the Redhead investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poete maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physiological and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigmatized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology. Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period's disability discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system, and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre's further significance in the light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.

This book explores the relationship between H.G. Wells's scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. It investigates how Wells utilizes his early fiction to participate in a range of topical scientific disputes and, increasingly, as a means to instigate social reform.

An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.

Since World War II critics have been predicting the decline of the novel. This book argues that the novel is not dead. Looking at American and English fiction it claims that the novel can not only change the possibilities of art, but also contribute to awareness of life's possibilities.

An indispensable resource for readers investigating Victorian literature and culture, this book offers a comprehensive summary of the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts of Victorian England. The Victorian era was a time of great social, scientific, and cultural change. The literary works of that period reflect that change and help us to better understand the Victorian world. This book examines the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of several important Victorian literary works: Jane Eyre,, by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights,, by Emily Bronte; A Tale of Two Cities,, by Charles Dickens; and several poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, including "The Cry of the Children," "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "A Curse for a Nation," and Aurora Leigh.. The volume provides historical explanations, literary analyses, and cultural context for each literary work, including primary documents from the nineteenth century. Topics investigated include women's rights, workers' rights, education reforms, marriage laws, race relations, inheritance and heredity, and other issues concerning gender, race, and class in the nineteenth century. Readers will gain a greater understanding of these major literary works as well as their historical context. Includes an introduction on background information about the Victorian era Presents a timeline of information about the period and context for the literary works discussed Explores the historical background of the literary works Excerpts primary source documents to give readers first-hand accounts of the issues addressed in the texts

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

This literary biographical study examines the life and works of the mid-Victorian woman novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose popularity is now well established. It places her writing in the context of her attitudes towards creative production, her relationship with publishers, and her literary friendships, as well as examining those events of her life which fed into her work. It pays particular attention to the ways in which she sought to reconcile the conflicting demands made upon her, as woman and as artist.

Taking its cue from Baudelaire's important essay "The Painter of Modern Life," in which Baudelaire imagines the modern artist as a "man of the world," this collection of essays presents Oscar Wilde as a "man of the world" who eschewed provincial concerns, cultural conventions, and narrow national interests in favor of the wider world and other worlds-both real and imaginary, geographical and historical, physical and intellectual-which provided alternative sites for exploration and experience, often including alternative gender expression or sexual alterity. Wilde had an unlimited curiosity and a cosmopolitan spirit of inquiry that traveled widely across borders, ranging freely over space and time. He entered easily and wholly into other countries, other cultures, other national literatures, other periods, other mythologies, other religions, other disciplines, and other modes of representation, and was able to fully inhabit and navigate them, quickly apprehending the conventions by which they operate. The fourteen essays in this volume offer fresh critical-theoretical and historical perspectives not just on key connections and aspects of Wilde's oeuvre itself, but on the development of Wilde's remarkable worldliness in dialogue with many other worlds: contemporary developments in art, science and culture, as well as with other national literatures and cultures. Perhaps as a direct result of this cosmopolitan spirit, Wilde and Wilde's works have been taken up across the globe, as the essays on Wilde's reception in India, Japan and Hollywood illustrate. Many of the essays gathered here are based on groundbreaking archival research, including some never-seen-before illustrations. Together, they have the potential to open up important new comparative, transnational, and historical perspectives on Wilde that can shape and sharpen our future understanding of his work and impact.

Romanticism on the Road challenges critical orthodoxy by arguing that Wordsworth rejected the political dogmas of his age. Refusing to ally with either radicals or conservatives after the French Revolution, the poet seizes on vagrants to attack the binary thinking dominating public affairs and to question the value of the Georgian domestic ideal. Drawing on current and historical discussions of homelessness, the study offers a cultural history of vagrancy and explains why Wordsworth chose the homeless to bear his message.

"Americans have cherished and magnified versions of an idealized Mark Twain. We admire and are amused by the celebrity, who sold his pseudonym and his carefully composed face to advertise pipe tobacco, cigarettes, whiskey, and postcards. The extent to which the received images are authentic or inauthentic is, however, in doubt. Common images must be modified when we examine the thoughts and emotions important to the mind and heart of Samuel L. Clemens, the private man."-from the Introduction No writer has been more frequently identified with America than Mark Twain, an emblematic figure often supposed to represent the essential qualities that make America most admirably American. In a fresh appraisal, supported by evidence from both the life and the writings, Guy Cardwell convincingly revises our images of this cultural icon. He portrays an exceptionally complex man who experienced debilitating tensions and neuroses. Caldwell finds that even before the comedian from the West met and married Olivia Langdon, the heiress from Elmira, New York, he was ambitious to join and conquer the world of Eastern affluence and gentility. Yet Clemens's jokes (in his private notebooks) aggressing against women and blacks suggest that his acculturation to gentility was never complete. This book throws new light on Clemens's relations with his wife and her family and on his attitudes toward business, money, art, sex, and the little girls whose company he sought compulsively during his later years. It argues persuasively that in the end Twain was hardly the robust and genial representative of America's mythic frontier past. Alienated from society and from his own writings, he was much more the prototype of the overstrung, exploitatively individualistic modern American.

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Bronte, Austen and Rossetti.

James Mussell provides an accessible account of the digitization of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. As studying this material is essential to understand the period, he argues that we have no choice but to engage with the new digital resources that have transformed how we access the print archive.

This book examines the highly complex relationship of women writers to Hellenism in the late-nineteenth century, arguing that the proliferation of Greek subjects in women's literature from the middle of the century suggest a collective movement into the classical tradition by women writers and scholars rather than comprehensive exclusion from it.

Sherlock Holmes is an iconic figure within cultural narratives. More recently, Conan Doyle has also appeared as a fictional figure in contemporary novels and films, confusing the boundaries between fiction and reality. This collection investigates how Holmes and Doyle have gripped the public imagination to become central figures of modernity.

This Hopkins Chronology describes the poet's family and early education, then gives a day-by-day account of what he was doing, reading and writing, and the people he met. Drawing on some material not published before, it illustrates the working life of a priest-poet whose work was not made public until more than thirty years after his death. There are additional sections on the religious and political background of a major Victorian writer whose life was essentially enigmatic and private.

Grounded in historical sources and informed by recent work in cultural, sociological, geographical and spatial studies, Romantic Geography illuminates the nexus between imaginative literature and geography in William Wordsworth's poetry and prose. It shows that eighteenth-century social and political interest groups contested spaces through maps, geographical commentaries and travel literature; and that by configuring 'utopian' landscapes Wordsworth himself participated in major social and political controversies in post-French Revolutionary England.