In this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' culture is at the heart of his work. She investigates a wide range of Stevenson's writing, including "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and "Treasure Island," offering a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Reid's close attention to Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the intersections between literature and science at the fin de siecle, and includes previously unpublished material from the Stevenson archive at Yale. Reid's interpretation offers a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Her analysis of Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the dynamic intersections between literature and science at the fin de siecle.

In its exploration of legal issues presented in novels of the Bronte sisters, this book represents a significant and original contribution to the study, not just of the Brontes and the mid-nineteenth century 'woman's novel', but also the situation of women in nineteenth century English law and the debates which moved around its prospective reform.

Atlantic Republic traces the legacy of the United States both as a place and as an idea in the work of English writers from 1776 to the present day. Seeing the disputes of the Reformation as a precursor to this transatlantic divide, it argues that America has operated since the Revolution as a focal point for various traditions of dissent within English culture. By ranging over writers from Richard Price and Susanna Rowson in the 1790s to Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book argues that America haunts the English literary tradition as a parallel space where ideology and aesthetics are configured differently. Consequently, it suggests, many of the key episodes in British history--parliamentary reform in the 1830s, the imperial designs of the Victorian era, the twentieth-century conflict with fascism, the advance of globalization since 1980--have been shaped by implicit dialogues with American cultural models. Rather than simply reinforcing the benign myth of a "special relationship," Paul Giles considers how various English writers over the past 200 years have engaged with America for various complicated reasons: its promise of political republicanism (Byron, Mary Shelley); its emphasis on religious disestablishment (Clough, Gissing); its prospect of pastoral regeneration (Ruxton, Lawrence); its vision of scientific futurism (Huxley, Ballard). The book also analyzes the complex cultural relations between Britain and the United States around the time of the Second World War, suggesting that writers such as Wodehouse, Isherwood, and Auden understood the United States and Germany to offer alternative versions of the kind of technologicalmodernity that appeared equally hostile to traditional forms of English culture. The book ends with a consideration of ways in which the canon of English literature might appear in a different light if seen from a transnational rather than a familiar national perspective.

Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how Wagner's dramas use their legendary or mythological raw material in a specifically 19th-century Romantic way to create meaning. It is argued that by means of Romantic irony, internal self-reflection or self-consciousness, each work deconstructs its own mythological or legendary nature. Musicologists with an interest in Wagner's works, and literary scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary applications of literary-critical theory, will appreciate this unique application of literary, theoretical, and critical concepts to the understanding of his music-dramas. This work will also appeal to scholars of German literature and of German cultural history. It discusses Wagner's single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal.

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. It is to enquire what dynamics texts develop as they strive to 'say the unsayable', and it is to think literature as a silence that speaks itself. This study describes these literary and silent dynamics through readings of Pascal's Pensees, Rousseau's Reveries, and Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable. It contributes to our understanding of three major writers and challenges our idea of what silence is. The subject of silence and of the ineffable has a long philosophical and critical tradition. A careful study of this tradition reveals the dominance of a limiting dualistic understanding of silence and its relationship to noise or language: silence becomes the negative other, the beyond, about which there remains nothing to say. The study of literary silence seeks rather to trace a language that becomes its own silence. It compromises the attempt to think a silence that moves within and through texts, that is inherent to the literary expression. Central to this theoretical endeavour are thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Gadamer, and Vattimo (among several others). The theoretical understanding of silence permits an effective methodology for reading literary silence. Notions of repetition, the aporia and the implosion, which are developed in reference to Kierkegaard and Bataille, describe textual strategies of literary silence and structure the readings. Finally, the reading of literary silence has its point of reference in writers like Mallarme, Blanchot, and Beckett. It is their texts that have taught us to become topological readers, to move in and out of texts' movements; they have shown us how the literary expression is irreducible to linear, meaning oriented language. As readers of such texts we have been prepared to read the dynamics of the unsayable, and finally to start discerning the silences of the literary.

British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include chapbooks and illustrated reactions.

Tom Winnifrith examines how the great nineteenth-century novelists managed to say something new and important about sexual behaviour in spite of rules which dictated that the recording of this behaviour should combine the utmost discretion and deep disapproval. On the surface their fallen heroines seem to suffer the conventional cruel fate of the erring female: death or Australia or both. Tom Winnifrith examines ways in which the great novelists continued to portray the complexities underlying the simple division of women into angels and whores.

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott's novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus-the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott's novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott's female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott's ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

The Victorian period was one of enormous cultural diversity with places for figures as different as Alfred Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Victorian Identities simultaneously celebrates that diversity whilst drawing out the connections between disparate voices. With essays on the 'Greats' of the period - Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Wilde - as well as on the less well-known sensation writer, Rhoda Broughton, and on the formation of children's voices in Victorian literature - the collection rejects narrow definitions of the period and its values, and exposes its texts to readings informed by contemporary literary theory.

What is "Wordsworthian" Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the "Wordsworthian," through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.

Sexuality and erotic desire were important components of Victorian culture, and the novels of the Victorian era reflect the sexual attitudes of the authors and culture of that period. The Stone and the Scorpion focuses on the interplay of erotics in the novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Using several extra-literary critical approaches, particularly feminist gender-relations theory, this book determines degrees of female subjectivity and desire in these novels. At the heart of the study is the belief that the disruption of conventional male-female dualities is essential to the recasting of the erotic relationship in contemporary culture. Mitchell re-reads several well-read novels by three major Victorian authors in order to analyze their symbolic construction of gender and sexuality. As a group, the novels she discusses are a recognized part of the established literary canon; they span the latter half of the 19th century; and they embody various forms of erotic desire. The book considers to what extent the novelists dare to invest their female characters with erotic subjectivity, and to what degree this investment changed over time.

The Female Narrator in the British Novel studies first-person narratives and demonstrates that how a woman tells her story is crucial to our understanding of its content, for a novel's mode of narration frequently undermines its ostensible plot. Analyzing relationships between the sexes in terms of battles for narrative authority, Sternlieb argues for a rethinking of the history of the marriage plot.

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as'animality studies' that focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments, without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both 'human' and 'animal' became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of 'the jungle' was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud, once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century produced new ways of thinking about the 'beast within' shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. But the central argument here is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal, despite reigning critical interpretations, were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and William James, as well as cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island, an African man on display in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo, and the Scopes "Monkey Trial." Ultimately, this book reveals not only new ways of thinking about familiar texts, but also the significance of the question of the animal in relation to fields such as the history of sexuality, studies of literary naturalism, and critical race studies within American literary and cultural studies. The book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

These writings, which first appeared in 1841, tell us much about the writer herself and the city in which she lived: Hartford, Connecticut. A cultural centre of the new nation, the city's Congregationalism, its free black society, and local literary tradition, are all reflected in Ann Plato's work. The topics that dominate are her ardent Christianity, her belief in education as a means of advancement, and her romantic preoccupation with death and, occasionally, racial issues.

What do we mean by 'The Gothic'? How was it seeded? Where is it located? Why is it frequently characterised by the breaching of boundaries and the play of transgression and taboo? This revised handbook will explore these questions and many more through over one hundred multi-authored entries by nearly eighty leading scholars. Sections in the book are devoted to major and minor Gothic writers, 'Gothic Themes, terms, concepts and contexts' and to 'Gothic Locations'. Developments in the field, which have taken place since the pioneering The Handbook to Gothic Literature first appeared over a decade ago, have led to this new edition. New entries are included on nine authors, as well as on areas such as children's literature, comedy, music and medicine. There is also an expanded list of further reading, a new Gothic filmography and a list of Gothicised websites. This authoritative and accessible handbook continues to explore, through a diverse, comprehensive and yet eclectic mix of topics, the perennial concerns of the Gothic. This handbook will be an invaluable servant to all lovers of the Gothic.

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the "music" of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.

This important collection of cultural life in America's heartland will prove indispensable to our understanding of the history of the struggle between the forces of repression and Puritanism on the one hand, and those who raised on high the banner of free thought on the other. The issues and ideas generated by this historical conflict continue to play a critical role on our present-day debates on ethics, education, culture, and the very future of the American people.

This is a collection of scholarly and critical studies of major writers intended for those needing modern and authoritative guidance through the characteristic difficulties of their work to reach an intelligent understanding and enjoyment of it.

Through her selection of fourteen essays, Tess Cosslett charts the rediscovery by feminist critics of the Victorian Women Poets such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and the subsequent developments as critics use a range of modern theoretical approaches to understand and promote the work of these non-canonical and marginalised poets. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism, investigating such questions as, how feminist are these poems, and does a women s tradition really exist? The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored.

Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.

William Wordsworth: Interviews and Recollections collects and reprints, on a generous scale, selections from the texts of both immediately recorded opinions and characterizations that were written down in later years. Represented in this anthology are 22 of Wordsworth's most important contemporaries. With the exception of Shelley, they all knew Wordsworth personally. It was difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any of them to write neutrally or objectively about the impression that Wordsworth made on them. Their comments make for lively reading.

The Artistry of Exile is a new reading of one of the most important themes of nineteenth-century literature. Exile represents a crisis in the always present tension between self and culture, the disturbance of memory, the quest for home, and the survival or not of life's heart quakes - all of which became identifying features of canonical Romanticism. Focusing on two interlinked groups of writers who, for various reasons, felt cast out of England and sought refuge in Italy, this book traces the material and metaphoric dynamics of distance in poems, novels and epistolary conversations. The book brings into dialogue the self-alienation and existential antagonism of the Cain figure with the contingencies of real travel: conversations about writing desks, lost parcels of books, missing pans and stray camels. Domestic and cosmic perspectives mingle as the book reveals how writers realize the full resonance of Dante's vivid summation of exile in the taste of different bread and the difficulty of another man's stairs. As a country that only exists in the early nineteenth-century as a memory, Italy both embodies and energises formal attempts to bridge the distance created by exile in the work of the Byron-Shelley circle and the later Barrett-Browning- Browning collaboration. Examining these writers in relation to Italian art, sound, religion, narrative art and history, the book presents a new perspective on Romantic canonicity and relocates contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism in the aesthetic, ethical and political debates of the late Romantic and early Victorian world.

This book combines literary criticism, postmodern theology, philosophy, and musicology in a rethinking of the relationship of modernist literature and religion. Erickson argues that theological modes of thinking are ingrained in the very roots of our metaphysical assumptions, and are impossible to escape, even and especially in the skeptical and experimental woks of modernism. By concentrating on moments of difficulty and ambiguity in works such as Henry James's "The Golden Bowl," Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," and Arnold Schoenberg's opera "Moses und Aron, "the book identifies the paradoxical construction of a god-idea buried in the tropes and metaphors of each text.

This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant-poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.