Before the ideas we now define as Romanticism took hold the word 'atmosphere' meant only the physical stuff of air; afterwards, it could mean almost anything, from a historical mood or spirit to the character or style of an artwork. Thomas H. Ford traces this shift of meaning, which he sees as first occurring in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Gradually 'air' and 'atmosphere' took on the new status of metaphor as Wordsworth and other poets re-imagined poetry as a textual area of aerial communication - conveying the breath of a transitory moment to other times and places via the printed page. Reading Romantic poetry through this ecological and ecocritical lens Ford goes on to ask what the poems of the Romantic period mean for us in a new age of climate change, when the relationship between physical climates and cultural, political and literary atmospheres is once again being transformed.

Jane Austen collected her childhood writings into three manuscript notebooks, both as a record of her earliest work and for the convenience of reading aloud to her family and friends. Volume the First (as she entitled it) contains fourteen pieces - literary skits and family jokes - dating from about 1787, when she was eleven, to 1793. Amusing in themselves, they give us a direct picture of the lively literary and family milieu in which the novelist's juvenilia was formed. This new edtion carries a Foreword by Lord David Cecil, a former president of the Jane Austen Society and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. There is also a Publisher's Preface by Brian Southam, author of Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts and other works on Jane Austen.

Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

At the heart of America's slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation's history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that out of all of slavery's perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and Ford argues that haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that humor is not a superficial feature of a small subset, but instead an integral feature in a great deal of American poetry written since the 1950s. Rather than viewing poetry as a lofty, serious genre, Carrie Conners asks readers to consider poetry alongside another art form that has burgeoned in America since the 1950s: stand-up comedy. Both art forms use wit and laughter to rethink the world and the words used to describe it. Humor's disruptive nature makes it especially whetted for critique. Many comedians and humorous poets prove to be astute cultural critics. To that end, Laugh Lines focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical critique. To show the range of recent American poetry that uses humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional, received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry; and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson. This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor. Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.

Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this truly remarkable artist.

Narrative theory goes back to Plato. It is an approach that tries to understand the abstract mechanism behind the story. This theory has evolved throughout the years and has been adopted by numerous domains and disciplines. Narrative therapy is one of many fields of narrative that emerged in the 1990s and has turned into a rich research field that feeds many disciplines today. Further study on the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of narrative therapy is vital to understand how it can be utilized to support society. Narrative Theory and Therapy in the Post-Truth Era focuses on the structure of the narrative and the possibilities it offers for therapy as well as the post-modern sources of spiritual conflict and how to benefit from the possibilities of the narrative while healing them. Covering topics such as psychotherapy, cognitive narratology, art therapy, and narrative structures, this reference work is ideal for therapists, psychologists, communications specialists, academicians, researchers, practitioners, scholars, instructors, and students.

Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time - from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative - are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.

Did 'sex education' actually exist in eighteenth-century France? Shaped by competing currents of religious dogma, atheist materialism and bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century France marked the beginning of what Michel Foucault called 'une fermentation discursive' on matters related to sex. But when we consult the educational theorists or philosophes of the time for their opinions on preparing a young person for life as a sexual being, we are met with a telling silence. Did an Enlightenment era that dared to make sex an object of discourse also dare to make it an object of pedagogy? Sex education in eighteenth-century France brings together specialists from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Using a wide variety of literary, historical, religious and pedagogical sources, contributors explore for the first time the nexus between sex and instruction. Although these two categories were publicly kept distinct, writers were effectively shaping attitudes and behaviours. Unraveling the complex system of rules and codes through which knowledge about sex was communicated, contributors uncover a new dimension in the practice of education in the eighteenth century.