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.

In this new research monograph, Tudor Balinsteanu draws on concepts of dance to demonstrate how the nonhuman is dealt with in terms of practical politics, that is, choreographies of social performance which emerge at the intersection of literature, art, and embodied life. Drawing on a number of influential texts by William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce, this truly interdisciplinary monograph explores the relations between the human and the nonhuman across centuries of literature and as demonstrated in philosophical concepts and social experiments.

From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience.

Does Thoreau belong to the past or to the future? Instead of canonizing him as a celebrant of "pure" nature apart from the corruption of civilization, the essays in "Thoreauvian Modernities" reveal edgier facets of his work--how Thoreau is able to unsettle as well as inspire and how he is able to focus on both the timeless and the timely. Contributors from the United States and Europe explore Thoreau's modernity and give a much-needed reassessment of his work in a global context.
The first of three sections, "Thoreau and (Non)Modernity," views Thoreau as a social thinker who set himself against the "modern" currents of his day even while contributing to the emergence of a new era. By questioning the place of humans in the social, economic, natural, and metaphysical order, he ushered in a rethinking of humanity's role in the natural world that nurtured the environmental movement. The second section, "Thoreau and Philosophy," examines Thoreau's writings in light of the philosophy of his time as well as current philosophical debates. Section three, "Thoreau, Language, and the Wild," centers on his relationship to wild nature in its philosophical, scientific, linguistic, and literary dimensions. Together, these sixteen essays reveal Thoreau's relevance to a number of fields, including science, philosophy, aesthetics, environmental ethics, political science, and animal studies.
"Thoreauvian Modernities" posits that it is the germinating power of Thoreau's thought--the challenge it poses to our own thinking and its capacity to address pressing issues in a new way--that defines his enduring relevance and his modernity.
Contributors: Kristen Case, Randall Conrad, David Dowling, Michel Granger, Michel Imbert, Michael Jonik, Christian Maul, Bruno Monfort, Henrik Otterberg, Tom Pughe, David M. Robinson, William Rossi, Dieter Schulz, Francois Specq, Joseph Urbas, Laura Dassow Walls.

Scholarly understanding of the Victorian literary field has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre's importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. Yet until very recently, work on sensationalism has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. This collection examines the fiction of women sensation writers who were immensely popular in the Victorian period but remain critically neglected today - writers such as M.C. Houston, Amelia Edwards, Rhoda Broughton, Florence Marryat and others. The Victorian sensation novel was categorically associated with women by Victorian reviewers and this collection extends our current understanding of this sub-genre by showing that female sensation writers were often sophisticated in their textual strategies, employing a range of metafictional techniques and narrative innovations. By moving beyond the novelists who have come to represent the genre, this book presents a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that constructed the concept of 'sensationalism' for Victorian readers and critics. The book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

This critical anthology examines the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Traditionally, the sublime has been associated with impressive natural phenomena and has been identified as a narrow aesthetic or philosophical category. Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750-1830: - Recovers a broader context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime - Offers a selection of texts from a wide range of ostensibly unrelated areas of knowledge which both generate and investigate sublime effects - Considers writings about mountains, money, crowds, the Gothic, the exotic and the human mind - Contextualises and supports the extracts with detailed editorial commentary Also featuring helpful suggestions for further reading, this is an ideal resource for anyone seeking a fresh, up-to-date assessment of the sublime.

Meredith is a novelist whom many readers have discovered with excitement, drawn to his radical portrayal of social and personal relations, especially of gender. Neil Robert's book is the first full-length study for ten years, and is the first to examine the novels in the light of modern literary theory, especially the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, showing that Meredith is a writer who engages profoundly with the ideological discourses of his time and is a still not fully discovered precursor of the modernist novel.

Bringing poststructuralist theories of discourse into dialogue with biologically and culturally informed models of pain and affect, this book explores the representation of traumatic historical events such as war and revolution in literary texts by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Zola. Focusing on the rising industrial capitalism of early modern France, Vaheed Ramanzani considers how the patterns of thought and practice developed during that period inflect a contemporary "culture of denial" and critiques the symbiosis between everyday forms of language and mass irruptions of violence.

This publication examines over 125 American, English, Irish and Anglo-Indian plays by 70 dramatists which were published in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer.

This volume explores women's intricate negotiations for traversing space in Anglo-American literature, written by or about women between the Victorian era and the 1950s. Whereas previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women's engagement with space, be it the urban setting, the domestic interior, or the natural world, this volume considers women's temporary occupation of an array of liminal spaces and its literary representations during the period of approximately one hundred years that permanently changed gender relations. It brings together careful and subtle readings of spaces that are neither strictly private nor incontestably public, and furnishes important evidence that being 'in transit' not only implies crossing, but often actually eradicating established boundaries: between the public and the private, between home and away, and between gender and genre codes.

Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other. As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.

This is the first study to argue that Jewish Mysticism influenced not only her Jewish novel, Daniel Deronda, but all of George Eliot's novels. The reader is left with a very different George Eliot from that assumed by most previous criticism. Though previous studies have attempted to qualify the still-dominant view that Eliot is firmly a part of the realistic tradition, this study goes further by demonstrating that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable in her fiction.

This new collection of essays by major scholars in the field looks at the ways in which cross-fertilization has taken place in Gothic writing from France, Germany, Britain and America over the last 200 years, and argues that Gothic writing reflects international exchanges in theme and form.

This is an investigation of Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance in his plays. He was allied to other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome and in his preoccupation with things Japanese, particularly "Noh" theatre with its central dance. The impact of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes also played its part in influencing Yeats's drama and he took interest in the "dance-as-meaning" debate. The book contains new data on Yeats's "At the Hawk's Well" dancer, Ito and new information on his personal acquaintance with music-hall and Ballets Russes from yet unpublished letters.

Today Blake scholarship is experiencing a period of unprecedented variety and mutuality. These essays reflect the methodological cross-fertilisations now taking place in Blake scholarship and explore the range of debates and contentions generated by these encounters, embracing figurative, structural, and material readings of Blake's life and works.

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing a series of lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for "The Prelude". These lyrics are revolutionary because they reconstruct a new version of the autobiographical "I". This work explores the many voices of the poetic speaker "Wordsworth" and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name.

This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake's poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake's relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocooen. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake's creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women from 1621-1931. It connects this tradition to ways of speaking desire in public in operation today, and to the development of theories of subjectivity in Western culture.

Bonner . . . provides a compendium of information, helpful to the undergraduate as well as to the scholar; a chronology of Chopin's life; nine translations by Chopin herself of French short stories, eight of which are by Guy de Maupassant, a major literary influence (five of these published here for the first time); period maps of Missouri, Louisiana, and New Orleans, and a 13-page bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources, which is thorough and organized for easy reference. The bulk of the book is devoted to a Dictionary of Characters, Places, Titles, Terms, and People from the Life and Works of Kate Chopin.' The Dictionary' will be especially helpful to those readers . . . who are unfamiliar with the Cajun and Creole terms--e.g., lagniappe, jambalaya--appearing in Chopin's fiction, or with the many references to French Catholicism made by her characters. . . . Overall, this volume is a valuable tool for both the novice and experienced Chopin reader, and is highly recommended. "Choice"

Recent years have witnessed a major rebirth of interest in the works of Kate Chopin, author of two novels and nearly 100 short stories. The current volume makes an important contribution to the study of Chopin's work by providing a dictionary of characters, places, plot briefs, poem briefs, biographical items, and selected terms; period maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Missouri; and a bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources. Also featured are Chopin's translations of eight Guy de Maupassant stories, five of which appear here in print for the first time, and one story by Adrien Vely.

The dictionary delineates the characters and places in Chopin's fiction, many of which reappear as major and minor elements throughout her work. Of particular significance are the many unnamed characters who contribute to the development of recurring social themes. The maps of relevant areas in Louisiana and Missouri will help make the connections between character and place, story, and setting more concrete. The bibliographic essay covers editions, manuscripts, and letters in the primary sources section. Biography and criticism, including general appraisals and those addressed to special topics or particular works, are included in the secondary sources section. The aim throughout is to resolve basic questions and confusions that persist regarding Chopin's work so that the reader can concentrate more productively--and more enjoyably--on the issues of form, theme, and influence that dominate her fiction.

Despite contemporary historical study of her contexts, Christina Rossetti continues to haunt the reader as a displaced subjectivity emptied of history. Through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of Christina Rossetti by her brothers, and the history of reception, this study asks how speaking with the dead can avoid critical ventriloquy. The figure of the mother is offered as a paradigm for theorizing a new reading that refuses to exorcise the ghost of Christina Rossetti.

This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalization in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism--despite much criticism--remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville's concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the 'meaning' of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville's work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian's guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.