Winner of the Portico Prize Shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year High-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's youth in rural Knutsford, her married years in the tension-ridden city of Manchester and her wide network of friends in London, Europe and America. Standing as a figure caught up in the religious and political radicalism of nineteenth century Britain, the book looks at how Elizabeth observed, from her Manchester home, the brutal but transforming impact of industry, enjoying a social and family life, but distracted by her need to write down the truth of what she saw. In this widely acclaimed biography, Elizabeth Gaskell emerges as an artist of unrecognized complexity, shrewdly observing the political, religious and feminist arguments of nineteenth century Britain, with enjoyment, passion and wit. Jenny Uglow is the bestselling author of Nature's Engraver, which won the National Arts Writers Award, and A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent books include Nature's Engraver, the story of Thomas Bewick, and In These Times, a history of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars.

First published in 1972, the second edition of this highly respected classic of Trollope criticism will be welcomed by Trollope scholars everywhere. David Skilton examines the literary background against which Trollope wrote, and drawing on the vast evidence of mid-Victorian periodical criticism, he shows how this criticism controlled the novelist's creativity. He then goes on to examine Trollope's particular type of realism in the context of the theories of literary imagination current in the 1860s.;'A book I admire. It has been of great value to me.' - J. Hillis Miller;'The first and still the best study of Trollope's relationships, connections and interactions with the literary world of his own time. Skilton's is the necessary introduction to any serious investigation of Trollope's fiction.' - John Sutherland

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all'.

This fascinating collection presents a rare look at women writers' first-hand perspectives on early American history. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many women authors began to write historical analysis, thereby taking on an essential role in defining the new American Republicanism. Like their male counterparts, these writers worried over the definition and practice of both public and private virtue, human equality, and the principles of rationalism. In contrast to male authors, however, female writers inevitably addressed the issue of inequality of the sexes. This collection includes writings that employ a wide range of approaches, from straightforward reportage to poetical historical narratives, from travel writing to historical drama, and even accounts in textbook format, designed to provide women with exercises in critical thinking—training they rarely received through their traditional education.

How is it that Flaubert, the last of the great French romantics, still seems so incredibly modern? In this biography, Geoffrey Wall investigates why it is that the author of Madame Bovary still exerts such a hold upon our imaginations.

In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers.

The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer's vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George's Mother, and Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat", a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay "Above All Things"; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

Mrs. Stanton's Bible traces the impact of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's religious dissent on the suffrage movement at the turn of the century and presents the first book-length reading of her radical text, the Woman's Bible. Stanton is best remembered for organizing the Seneca Falls convention at which she first called for women's right to vote. Yet she spent the last two decades of her life working for another cause: women's liberation from religious oppression. Stanton came to believe that political enfranchisement was meaningless without the systematic dismantling of the church's stifling authority over women's lives.

In 1895, she collaboratively authored this biblical exegesis, just as the women's movement was becoming more conservative. Stanton found herself arguing not only against male clergy members but also against devout female suffragists. Kathi Kern demonstrates that the Woman's Bible itself played a fundamental role in the movement's new conservatism because it sparked Stanton's censure and the elimination of her fellow radicals from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Stanton's Bible dramatically portrays this crucial chapter of women's history and facilitates the understanding of one of the movement's most controversial texts.

Elizabeth Stoddard combines the narrative style of the popular nineteenth-century male-centered bildungsroman with the conventions of women's romantic fiction in this revolutionary exploration of the conflict between a woman's instinct, passion, and will, and the social taboos, family allegiances, and traditional New England restraint that inhibit her. Set in a small seaport town (1862), The Morgesons is the dramatic story of Cassandra Morgeson's fight against social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. An indomitable heroine, Cassandra not only achieves an equal and complete love with her husband and ownership of her family's property, but also masters the skills and accomplishments expected of women.

Counterpointed with the stultified lives of her aunt, mother, and sister, Cassandra's success is a striking and radical affirmation of women's power to shape their own destinies. Embodying the convergence of the melodrama and sexual undercurrents of gothic romance and Victorian social realism, The Morgesons marks an important transition in the development of the novel and evoked comparisons during Stoddard's lifetime with such masters as Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, the Brontes, and Hawthorne.

"What is the meaning of a word?" In this thought-provoking book, Hagberg demonstrates how this question--which initiated Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of language--is significant for our understanding not only of linguistic meaning but of the meaning of works of art and literature as well.

The phenomenon of performance is central to Mark Twain's writing and persona, but Twain's performative aspects have usually been dismissed as theatrical and discounted as low-brow burlesque. This book takes Twain's theatricality seriously and shows how Twain's work both echoes and engages the social and cultural problems embodied in 19th-century popular entertainments.;Knoper draws on theatre history, theories of acting and bodily expression, psychology and physiology, scientific accounts of spiritualism, and commercial spectacles to demonstrate Twain's use of "acting" and the "natural" in his creative explorations. The book aims to enlarge our understanding of Mark Twain, the artist and the man, and also provides a window into a culture whose entertainments registered the sexual, racial, economic and scientific forces that where transforming it.

The author reveals not only the surprising wealth of theatrical themes in the 19th-century English novel but also the complex politics of this theatricality. 19th-century fiction is typically understood as enshrining the bourgeois values of domesticity, subjectivity and sincerity. But the author demonstrates that private experience in Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Henry James in fact follows a rigorous "public" script that constructs gender, sexual and class identities. At the same time, however, the 19th-century novel erupts with extravagant theatrical forms like travesty, transvestism, charade and carnival. Theatricality not only enforces social norms but also provides novelists with ways of resisting them.;The author thus challenges recent interpretations of the 19th-century novel as a disciplinary apparatus. Theatricality as deployed here encourages the rethinking of the 19th-century novel and its various cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence. This rethinking, moreover, yields not only a new interpretation of the 19th-century novel, but also a new, more frankly theatrical approach to interpretation itself.

The author uses Thomas Robbins' 1820 edition of Mather's work to show how a Puritanical political sentiment prompted American Renaissance writers to address the implications of democracy. Hawthorne, Stoddard, and Stowe used Mather's work to discover the importance of democratic concepts and categori

Dostoevsky's autobiographical novel combines aspects of two obsessions: the love of a rejecting woman and the fever of gambling.