"Wordsworth's verse and compelling criticism have shaped our understanding of poetic art since the Romantic period. This collection is the first in years to reexamine Wordsworth's complex theory of poetry in depth. Designed to be equally useful and inspiring, it provides much-needed reassessments of a vital juncture of Romantic creativity"--Provided by publisher.

William Blake's literary works are characterized by a ceaseless dynamics constituted in the fierce interactions of the language, thought, and narrative of his myth. Highlighting the critical problems facing the linear approach that the study of Blake has adopted from the traditional methodology of Newtonian science, Jules van Lieshout argues that nonlinearity is the key to understanding Blake's prophecies. Throughout his discussions, Van Lieshout focuses on the relation of Blake's Generation and Eternity, which he identifies as Bakhtinian 'world views'. In Generation, existence is finalized as a hierarchy of geometric 'dark globes', each assuming the character of universal whole to the exclusion of all others. Eternity, on the other hand, is Blake's fractal 'human form' of existence that is continuously organized and reorganized in the dynamic interaction of whole and parts. Blake represents these world views as interinvolved. Their dynamic interaction reflects and refracts his conceptual thought, mythological narrative, and poetic language. Hence, his visionary epic self-organizes into a self-similar complex system whose patterns of behaviour are not merely remarkably like those that modern applications of nonlinear dynamics are revealing in the physical world, but are indeed inherent in the processes of writing and reading his individual works.

"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.

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.

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.

First published in 1983, this book explores a number of avenues of critical thinking about Joseph Conrad, showing him as an author deeply concerned with humankind's ethical motivation and its relationship with the ideas of evolution current in his day. Allan Hunter establishes Conrad's detailed knowledge of the leading evolutionary arguments of the period and the main questions posed: were ethics God-given or were morals merely an evolved attribute? His novels are shown as debates with, and extensions of, the theories of Huxley, Darwin, Carlyle, Spencer, Lombroso and others on the nature of humanity and altruism.

First published in 1982, Images of Crisis explores the premise that literature and art exploit various images to present culturally prevalent ideas, and thus create their own form of iconology. George Landow shows how the tumultuous history of the past two hundred years has resulted in a plethora of metaphors associated with moments of human crisis. Avalanches and volcanoes emerge as focal images in an aesthetic that concerns itself increasingly with the vulnerability of humanity. However, it is in the transformation of traditional religious images that the ideas of the vacant universe are most dramatically presented. Associated with this central idea are ironic transformations of other images that formerly had been associated with Christianity as paradigms of belief: the journey of Odysseus, the rainbow of the Covenant and Robinson Crusoe. Combining close textual analysis with a theory of literary iconology, this fascinating reissue will be of particular value to students with an interest in literary images, and literary and cultural history.

Percy Shelley is widely considered one of the most important Romantic poets of the 19th Century and was a key influence on the Victorian and pre-Raphaelite poets in the century following his death in 1822. However, for many years his writing was largely ignored in the mainstream due to the radical politics he espoused and it is only in relatively recent times he has become universally admired. Routledge Library Editions: Percy Shelley collects a broad range of scholarship ranging from examinations of Shelley's style and political intentions to an assessment of his impact on the broader Romantic Movement. This set reissues 4 books on Percy Shelley originally published between 1945 and 2009 and will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.

Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's 'dark visions of torment'. -- .

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.

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.

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.

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.

George Eliot was passionate about music and her writing is steeped in musical allusion. This book explores musical reference in her work and investigates contexts such as Eliot's friendship with Wagner, the legacy of Romanticism, music's role in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of female musicality. The book establishes how intensely Eliot's musical allusions are informed by her contemporary culture and offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which she took literary realism into previously uncharted regions.

This book provides an analytical understanding of some of Tagore's most contested and celebrated works and ideas. It reflects on his critique of nationalism, aesthetic worldview, and the idea of 'surplus in man' underlying his life and works. It discusses the creative notion of surplus that stands not for 'profit' or 'value', but for celebrating human beings' continuous quest for reaching out beyond one's limits. It highlights, among other themes, how the idea of being 'Indian' involves stages of evolution through a complex matrix of ideals, values and actions-cultural, historical, literary and ideological. Examining the notion of the 'universal', contemporary scholars come together in this volume to show how 'surplus in man' is generated over the life of concrete particulars through creativity. The work brings forth a social scientific account of Tagore's thoughts and critically reconstructs many of his epochal ideas. Lucid in analysis and bolstered with historical reflection, this book will be a major intervention in understanding Tagore's works and its relevance for the contemporary human and social sciences. It will interest scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature and cultural studies.

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.

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.

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.

Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates offers a comprehensive and critically engaging introduction to the study of Victorian literature and addresses the most popular and vibrant topics in the field today. Separated into twelve sections, this anthology investigates issues as diverse as neo-formalism, sensationalism, religion, evolution, psychology, gender and sexuality, colonialism, imperialism, and economics. Each section contains at least three classic essays from leading scholars which offer a variety of approaches and theories from the liveliest areas of current criticism and debate in the field. Each section concludes with a newly written essay from a subject expert that reflects on this work and looks forward to new directions. A sign-posted introduction to the key critical contributions in Victorian studies from the past twenty-five years sets the reader on their path. Providing both the essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis, this book is the perfect guide for students and scholars of Victorian literature.

"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.