India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period. But what was the true nature of imaginative engagement with British India? This study explores how a range of authors, from Edmund Burke and Sir William Jones to Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, sought to come to terms with India's strangeness and distance from Britain.

"A friend in history", Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul". And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature.

In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing -- the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature -- a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

"Gender in Film Adaptations of the British Nineteenth-Century Novel" is a major study of how women have been represented in film and television adaptations of British nineteeth-century novels. Exploring classics like "Wuthering Heights" (1939) and "Jane Eyre" (1944), this book shows how cultural anxieties about women shaped such adaptations in Britain and America during the Depression and after World War II, then going on to approach the more recent wave of adaptations in the 1990s.

This book is the first to make extensive use of unpublished manuscripts to show how a period of English literature affected W.B.Yeats's development as a poet. Besides presenting a factual account of his acquaintance with English Renaissance writers based on evidence from his library and elsewhere, the study examines his response to numerous minor figures and several major ones - including Spenser, Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies.
Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.

This monograph covers Dickens and creativity, analysing both his discussion of creativity and imagination and illustrations in his work.Charles Dickens' experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh.Discussing Dickens' novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity.

What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.

"The silence of Barbara Synge" provides a fascinating companion volume to Bill McCormack's acclaimed "Fool of the Family" (2000), a biography of the playwright J.M. Synge (1871--1909).

Taking the alledged death of Mrs John Hatch (née Synge) in 1767 as a focal point, this book explores the varied strands of the Synge family tree in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland.

Key events in the family's history are carefully documented, including a suicide in 1769 which is echoed in an early Synge play, the effects of the famine which influenced The "Playboy of the Western World" in 1907, and the behavior of Francis Synge at the time of the union.

"The Silence of Barbara Synge" is a unique work of cultural enquiry, combining archival research, literary criticism, and religious and medical history to pull the strands together and relate them to the family's literary descendent J.M. Synge.

What does it mean to 'bear blindness' and why should this be a concern for male poets after Milton? This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition. The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This imaginative revisionist study suggests a new interpretative framework for Victorian men's poetry, while providing detailed and extensive re-readings of many major poems The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.

How are signs and symptoms of psychic alienation variously enfigured in literary texts? And how do readers invariably figure in some form of the 'madness' they attempt to figure out? These are some of the questions addressed by Figuring Madness , a study which employs the insights of current post-structuralist psychoanalysis and semiotic theory to examine the complex interimplication of the subject and object of madness that is always implied by the dynamics of analytic dia-gnosis. In its focus on the implications of writing and reading signs of madness, the study offers new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts by authors spanning the period from Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James.

Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, first published in 1931, presents a collection of tributes to and reminiscences about the renowned socialist poet, pioneering gay rights activist, environmentalist and political thinker. Embroiled in controversy with prominent figures of all political persuasions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carpenter's vision of sexual freedom, democracy and an end to commercialism was maintained with integrity over the course of his whole life. These portraits and anecdotes testify to a man of both determination and warmth, whose writings, though inspirational for many up to the 1960s, are seldom read today.

Edgeworth is regarded as a pioneer in the development of the regional novel and the use of vernacular language. This study investigates her attitudes towards language and regionalism. It shows, by a detailed discussion of her major Irish texts - Castle Rackrent , Essay on Irish Bulls , Ennui , The Absentee and Ormond - how her intellectual 'Lunar' background, and her life in Ireland during the momentous years of the Union is reflected in the form and language of her writing.

This collection of essays represents the first book to explore the complex influence of homosexuality on the life and fiction of Henry James. An extensive biographical introduction is complemented by an essay documenting James' friendships with younger men, which includes quotations from unpublished letters. Other subjects include the influence on James of the emergence of a specific concept of the homosexual in Victorian England and James' reactions to the aesthetic movement. New, often radical, perspectives on stories from all phases of James' career are also included.

Although John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. This is the first study on this relationship, with contributors examining Ruskin's connection to pre-modernist writers such as Worringer and Pater and the importance of Ruskin's thought to modernists such as Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and Lawrence and to intellectual history and architectural theory.

"Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age" argues that Gothic writing of the Romantic period is queer. Discussing a variety of texts, it studies how contemporary queer theory can help us to read the obliqueness and invisibility of same-sex desire in a culture of vigilance over transgressive sexuality. It articulates the complex manifestations of desire through examining the discourses of the body, in particular the gaze, and shows how the Gothic's ambivalent gender politics destabilize heteronormative narratives and gives a voice to queer desires.

This book attempts to reinstate the importance of authorial intention by examining arguments against it from a variety of sources - American New Criticism, European Structuralism and various kinds of postmodernist theory. It enlists the aid of Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophy of language and action, as well as studying the play on intention in the manipulation of character and action in the work of Shakespeare and other English writers from 1600 to the present day.

Alphabetically arranged, the entries in this encyclopedic study cover Woody Allen's movies, plays, fiction, television shows, and stand-up comedy from 1964 through 1998. Film entries begin with basic production information followed by a literary analysis of the work, which considers how and why Allen develops new narrative forms for conveying his stories. The dominant themes in Allen's work and the literary and cultural traditions he draws upon are discussed. Entries draw connections among Allen's works, outline his relationships with specific cinematographers and actors, point out major influences, and demonstrate how Allen fits into the Western canon of literature, film, and philosophy. Collectively, the entries reveal a serious and substantial artist whose experimentation with narrative form and structure enables him to explore human nature and human relationships in a new, innovative, and insightful manner.

Literature and film scholars and Woody Allen enthusiasts will appreciate the easily accessible information provided in this encyclopedic format. A filmography and bibliography follow the entries and offer suggestions for further research. An index is included and photographs enhance the text.

From the late nineteenth century women began to enter British universities. Their numbers were small and their gains hard won and fiercely contested, yet they inspired a whole new genre of fiction. This collection of largely forgotten and rare texts forms a valuable primary resource for scholars of literature, social history and women's education.

This book tackles the interpretative problem of "pleasure" in Keats's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured, and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard interpretation that attributes Keats's poetic development to his separation from Hunt, Mizukoshi argues that Keats, imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records--Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson, and many now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of material (including journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many fans.

In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses, and studies its emergence in the major works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. Each of these writers disrupts the certitudes of imperial ideology by appropriating the language of ethnography, and using it to describe the social domestic field. Providing fresh readings of both canonical and neglected novels, this original volume will be of interest to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and postcolonial studies.

This book focuses on an exciting moment in the history of Anglo-German literary exchange in the Romantic period, the moment of George Gordon Byron's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's interrelated encounters with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's seminal dramatic poem, Faust.

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.

Despite attracting the admiration of Modernists like Nabokov and Borges, Stevenson remains for many an apologist for the lost world of the romance. This is not only to misread and simplify his fiction, it is greatly to undervalue his lively, forward-looking literary essays. Strenously resisting the authority of the literary 'fathers' (though haunted by the complexities of paternity), Stevenson reveals strong affinities with emergent Modernism. It is from this perspective that Alan Sandison's latest book (the first to appear for nearly thirty years) conducts a lively and readable re-examination of this often underrated writer.