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.

Explores the process involved in reading William Blake's poems. The poems include on the same pages, verbal and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal and visual texts involves different asthetic assumptions and operations, Blake's texts make different demands on their readers which further complicates the reading activity. The author attempts to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the illuminated text as a physical artifact.

From the claustrophobic environment of Haworth Parsonage emerged an astonishing range and diversity of character and talent. Between them the two youngest Bronte sisters wrote three novels, each sharply individual in style, purpose and subject-matter. The title, first published in 1968, discusses and illustrates the similarities and differences in the writings of Emily and Anne Bronte, paying particular attention to their place in the development of the Victorian novel. He stresses the complexities of structure and characterisation in Wuthering Heights, introducing the reader first to the background of the novel. This book will be of interest to students of English Literature.

Written by literary scholars, historians of science, and cultural historians, the twenty-two original essays in this collection explore the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships between science and culture through the periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging across the spectrum of periodical titles, the six sections comprise: 'Women, Children, and Gender', 'Religious Audiences', 'Naturalizing the Supernatural', 'Contesting New Technologies', 'Professionalization and Journalism', and 'Evolution, Psychology, and Culture'. The essays offer some of the first 'samplings and soundings' from the emergent and richly interdisciplinary field of scholarship on the relations between science and the nineteenth-century media.

"The Hysteric's Revenge" considers fin-de-siecle French women writers in the context of prevailing cultural anxieties about female intellect. During the years that overlap between the fin-de-siecle and the Belle Epoque, women began to write in record numbers, due to a number of factors including educational reforms and demographic shifts. This trend terrified many male literary critics, who described it as the "crisis of women's writing" in a series of efforts to circumscribe the perceived problem. Such critics frequently linked women's writing to sexual depravity. According to popular medical theories, the fragile confluence of the female mind and body might steer the woman writer towards illicit sexual behavior when she exercised her intellect.

This book argues, however, that the fear of sexual abandon--though real--veiled an even more insidious fear: that women might be capable of intellectual equality with men and thus pose a threat to the most basic structures of French patriarchal society. In demonstrating the pervasiveness of this anxiety through analysis of nineteenth-century medical texts, literary criticism, and fiction, "The Hysteric's Revenge" brings into relief a critical relationship between the female mind and body that is essential to understanding the discursive position of the turn-of-the-century woman writer.

The novels presented here confront this mind/body problem through a wide variety of styles and genres that challenge conventional fin-de-siecle notions of femininity. From the compelling autobiography of Liane de Pougy--one of Paris's most renowned courtesans--to Colette's frank discussions of female pleasure in one of her early novels, to the violent creativity of Rachilde's androgynous heroine, Mesch demonstrates how both canonical and non-canonical writers promoted women's intellectual authority through the development of a sexual counter-discourse. In engaging the relationship between women's minds and bodies, these novels challenge the conclusions of a century of doctors who sought to prove a physiological basis for female intellectual inferiority. At the same time, they point the way towards later French feminists who sought to subvert patriarchal structures through literary explorations of sexuality.

Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson form an engaging triad of poets who, considered together, enrich the poetics of each other; the works of the three poets address language, birth, and scientific aspects of culture in ways that frame new perceptions of sex roles. Exacerbating 19th-century American expectations for sexually-constructed experience, they employ tactics that disrupt patriarchal signification. The first book to group these three poets together, this volume examines the daring language experiments in which they engage. It explores their use of pseduoscientific and scientific studies of alchemy, hydropathy, and botany to inform their understanding of language and birth and to discover expressions that challenge expectations for 19th-century poetry.

The rising awareness of women's rights, which concurred with the antebellum call for a new American literature, also informed the emerging sense of the feminine that prompts the poets to use the maternal in their poetry. While they do not address the woman question of the 19th century in concrete ways, they nonetheless relied upon the female experience of birthing to create a new relationship with language and to question the nature of signification.

Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgement upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment-and at our own.

Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.

An excellent introduction to one of the best known authors in English Literature.

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood.

This study examines Hardy's prolonged struggle with his contemporary readers, whose bourgeois values he despised. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to strategies of subversion, smuggling material past his editors and finally to outspoken attack. T.R. Wright attempts to balance historical research into the response of "actual" readers and the material conditions of publishing with literary-critical analysis of the "implied" reader inscribed in the novels themselves.

This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover--embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgment--to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.

According to Orwell, the North was 'a strange country'. In an industrial landscape, its inhabitants seem to inhabit a bleak world caught in the gaze of 1930s realism. Such stereotypes have been tenacious. This book challenges these stereotypes, establishing the strategic and mobile nature of 'the North' and the effects of literary realism.

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new, and significant, theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker.

These letters have been selected according to their ability to convey the essential biographical developments of a very interesting life, and their ability to represent highly characteristic verbal and pictorial expressions of a great man of letters. In spite of his struggles, Thackeray articulates in his letters an exhuberance characteristic of one of the great enjoyers of life. Seventy five of his comical illustrations accompany the texts of these letters.

During the years 1880 to 1945, American theatre grew up, moving from entertainment-driven motives and melodramatic formulas to serious confrontations with issues of its time and to an experimentation with forms that would allow those confrontations to be frank and earnest. Many of the playwrights of this time wrote works of lasting significance, while others have impacted the work of contemporary dramatists. This reference is a guide to American theatre during this formative period.

The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries for 40 American playwrights active between 1880 and 1945. Included are the most frequently canonized figures, as well as previously neglected women and minority playwrights whose work is a vital part of American theatre history. Each entry includes a biographical overview, a summary of the critical reception of major productions and significant revivals, a critical assessment of the playwright's career, and a listing of archival, primary, and secondary bibliographic material.

The life, birth, and early years of 'the Fariyaq'-the alter ego of the Arab intellectual Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq,' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures. Al-Shidyaq also celebrates the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language. Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its "obscenity," and later editions were often abridged. This is the first English translation of the work and reproduces the original Arabic text, published under the author's supervision in 1855.

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

This set of 42 volumes, originally published between 1965 and 2009, are authored by renowned international scholars in the field of nineteenth century literature. They explore a variety of authors such as Dickens, Hardy, Bronte, Austen, Gaskell, Zola, Meredith, Eliot, Gissing, Hawthorne, James and Wharton. The titles also examine a wide range of themes including gender, class, religion, politics, philosophy and music.

In this passionate and tender book, John Jones discusses the narrative techniques and linguistic subtleties of the novels of Dostoevsky.

As its startling and aggressive title suggests, Dickens Novels as Verse is no standard work of literary criticism. It is, in fact, altogether new and original. Jordan likens the experience of some of the great Dickens novels, particularly the later ones (namely, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) to the experience of lyric verse. The point is not that Dickens novels could ever be mistaken for lyric poems, but that the experience of some of the best of Dickens's novels, despite their undoubted sprawl, is like the experience of lyric poems-is so because the novels are made up of the same things that make great verse great: intricate, largely unnoticeable tissues of alliteration-like patterning that net across the work and give narratively insignificant coherence to it. Dickens Novels as Verse meticulously describes these book-length patterns in clear, lucid prose. Its three chapters, each focused on a single Dickens novel, are full of close analyses that can be immediately used by teachers, students, and all other readers of Dickens to grasp why Dickens always seems to be a greater writer than the quality of his ideas might lead us to expect.

The text here is based on Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford's 1967 edition, footnoted to include biographical discoveries. Reviews, letters by Melville and belated praise is collected, and a wealth of new biographical material has been added, while new research is highlighted. Parker also explores what writing Moby-Dick cost Melville and his family.

Proposes an interdisciplinary solution to the "Thoreau problem" through the connection between his ecological study of nature and his intense interest in the emerging social sciences. Recent book-length studies of Thoreau have focused either on his place in the history of the natural sciences or have applied political principles to his works. None, however, has fully addressed what ecocritic Rebecca Solnit calls "the Thoreau problem," the compartmentalizing of Thoreau's mind into either that of a hermit of nature or that of a champion of social reform. This book proposes an interdisciplinary solution to this problem through the connection between Thoreau's ecological study of nature and his intense interest in the emerging social sciences, especially the history of civilization and ethnology. The book first establishes Thoreau's "human ecology," the relation between the natural sciences and the social sciences in his thinking, exploring how his reading in contemporary books about the history of humanity and racial science shaped his thinking and connecting these emerging anthropological texts to his late nature writings. It then discusses these connections in his major works, including Walden and his "reform papers" such as "Civil Disobedience," the travel narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. The concluding chapter focuses on Thoreau's attitude toward Manifest Destiny, arguing, against conventional views, that considering both his life and his writing, especially the essay "Walking," we must conclude that he both accepted and endorsed Manifest Destiny as an inevitable result of cultural succession. Richard J. Schneider is Professor Emeritus from Wartburg College. He has authored a monograph and many articles as well as edited three collections on Thoreau.