'A wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive': Charles Dickens's conflicted feelings about Paris typify the fascination and repulsion with which a host of mid-nineteenth-century British writers viewed their nearest foreign capital. Variously perceived as the showcase for sophisticated, cosmopolitan talent, the home of revolution, a stronghold of Roman Catholicism, and a shrine to irreligious hedonism, Paris was also a city where writers were respected and journalism flourished. This historically-grounded account of the ways in which Paris touched the careers and work of both major and minor Victorian writers considers both their actual experiences of an urban environment, distinctively different from anything Britain offered, and the extent to which this became absorbed and expressed within the Victorian imaginary. Casting a wide literary net, the first part of this book explores these writers' reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Paris for mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists., paying particular attention to the ways in which the young Thackeray's exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. The final part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly-growing British readership.

The Bible and Literature is a 1.5 million word resource in five volumes that provides researchers with an authoritative resource on the impact and influence of the bible upon the development of literature, charting this relationship from the classical period to the modern day. The international spread of the biblical text is reflected in a structure that considers the broader geographical, philosophical, and theological factors that crop up when the bible’s role in culture and society is considered. The work reflects a broader cultural narrative that is dependent upon the bible for its relevance and yet also contributes to the bible’s own continuing relevance in modern society. Each volume is edited by a leading specialist in the period, and begins with a set of introductory materials including a chapter on how the biblical text is mediated in the given period. Ten thematic essays then introduce the key thinkers, works, events and themes of the period. Extracts from primary materials are then presented with specialist commentary showing how these texts interact with the bible itself. The five volumes cover: The Late Classical and Medieval Periods, The Renaissance and Reformation Periods, Enlightenment to Romanticism, The Victorian Period, and The Modern Period.

How do writers work? The differing habits of seven great authors are examined in this collection. Writers often meditate on what physical situations they need to do the work in hand. A room of their own, bills, bed, procrastination, regular meals, Benzedrine and beer, office routines, walking and riding, even prison, can be machines that make them write. Trollope got 2,000 words done every morning, watch on the table. Clare composed en pleine air, jotting on his hat rim. Wesley's hymns came to him on horseback. The Bronte sisters paced round adrawing-room table. Donne was dismally prompted to write by nappies. Johnson needed the printer's devil knocking at his door. On a grand scale, city planners try to entice the creative classes into a creative area: while at alocal level, readers have a magical sense that putting themselves into the bodily position of a writer may allow them to join in her planning and plotting. The essays in this volume examine the working habits of seven greatauthors, from 1600 to today: Jonson, Milton, the Bronte sisters, Trollope, Oliphant, and Auden. There are also interviews on the creative environment with the Poet Laureate of Great Britain, the British Library's Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts, the Director of the Hay Festival, research fellows at Stratford and the Globe, and a poet-web-blogger. CONTRIBUTORS: STAN SMITH, ELISABETH JAY, N. JOHN HALL, STEVIE DAVIS, PETER C. HERMAN, FARAH KARIM-COOPER, KATE RUMBOLD, MICHELLE O'CALLAGHAN, ADAM SMYTH, ANDREW MOTION, JAMIE ANDREWS, ROBERT SHEPPARD, PETER FLORENCE

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is a defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology. The volume first offers a chronological account of key moments in the formation of the tradition; goes on to demonstrate literary ways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, and literary conceptions of theological texts; and finally explores the great themes that have preoccupied the Jewish and Christian traditions. Framing editorial essays describe the history, the cultural implications, and the methodological issues of this now popular interdisciplinary study, before speculating as to its possible futures in a postmodern, multicultural world.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work. This volume includes her 1895 novel Old Mr Tredgold with editorial notes by Elisabeth Jay including a new introduction and headnote, proving key information about the book and its publication history.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

As an expatriate Scots woman, Mrs Oliphant (1828-97) started her prolific and accomplished writing career far removed from the centre of Victorian literary life. Presenting an often surprising portrait of the professional Victorian woman writer, Elisabeth Jay's comprehensive biography considers the way in which Mrs Oliphant perceived her own life, and the wider question of whether women writers have been well served by the mythological structures of male biography.

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is a defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology. The volume first offers a chronological account of key moments in the formation of the tradition; goes on to demonstrate literary ways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, and literary conceptions of theological texts; and finally explores the great themes that have preoccupied the Jewish and Christian traditions. Framing editorial essays describe the history, the cultural implications, and the methodological issues of this now popular interdisciplinary study, before speculating as to its possible futures in a postmodern, multicultural world.

'I am sure the more fully she - Charlotte Brontë - the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known - the more highly she will be appreciated.' Mrs Gaskell was quite clear about her priorities when she began to set down the facts of a 'wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it'. The result was one of the greatest of all English biographies. The book itself was not to be without its stormy passage: Mrs Gaskell, as well she knew, ran up against Victorian shibboleths of propriety and sexual prudery. However, not even the amendments and cuts she was obliged to make in the second and third editions could destroy its overall unity or her psychologically convincing vision of the suffering, emotionally starved and tortured Charlotte Brontë whose life and pitiful death still grips and appalls us. The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in notes and appendices.

'Coward! Sneak! May good men shun him, from henceforth! may his Queen refuse to receive him! You, an earl's daughter! Oh, Isabel! How utterly you have lost yourself!' When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution. Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and promiscuity threatened the sanctity of the family. In her novel the simple act of hiring a governess raises the spectres of murder, disguise, and adultery. Her sensation novel was devoured by readers from the Prince of Wales to Joseph Conrad and continued to fascinate theatre-goers and cinema audiences well into the next century. This edition returns for the first time to the racy, slang-ridden narrative of the first edition, rather than the subsequent stylistically 'improved' versions hitherto reproduced by modern editors. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the "Pink Tide" in eight national cases-Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela-the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, Maria Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodriguez Gusta, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson

Q. D. Leavis declared Margaret Oliphant's heroine Lucilla to be the 'missing link' in Victorian literature between Jane Austen's Emma and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, and 'more entertaining, more impressive and more likeable than either'.

Returning home to tend her widowed father Dr Marjoribanks, Lucilla soon launches herself into Carlingford society, aiming to raise the tone with her select Thursday evening parties. Optimistic, resourceful and blithely unimpeded by self-doubt, Lucilla is a superior being in every way, not least in relation to men. This Penguin Classics edition of Miss Marjoribanks (1865) is introduced and edited by Margaret Oliphant's acclaimed biographer Margaret Jay.

By the start of the Victorian period the school of British economists acknowledging Adam Smith as its master was in the ascendancy. 'Political Economy', a catch-all title which ignored the diversity of viewpoints to be found amongst the discipline's leading proponents, became associated in the popular mind with moral and political forces held to be uniquely conducive to the progress of an increasingly industrialised and competitive society. 'Political Economy' served in turn as the focus for critics of equally diverse moral and political persuasions, who sought to challenge the materialism of contemporary society and offer their own assessments of the profound social changes of the time. In the introductory essay to the collection of readings from such 'critics of capitalism', the editors review the principles of the early economists, the way in which these principles were appropriated and applied by their Victorian successors and the contrasting modes which critics of popular economic ideas assumed. Subsequent extracts from the writings of the Owenite Socialist John Bray, Carlyle, Marx and Engels, J. S. Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, T. H. Green, William Morris and G. B. Shaw, demonstrate both the breadth of the possible grounds for ideological opposition to the prevailing philosophy and the shifting nature of the debate as 'Political Economy' itself was revealed as incapable of explaining or responding to the changing conditions of the 1870s. Headnotes to the extracts describe the genesis of individual debate and discuss distinctive stylistic features. Annotation in the form of footnotes and endnotes has been designed to gloss obscure allusions and arguments. In making more accessible the socio-economic writings of those authors now better known for their imaginative work, this volume will enable readers to reach a more profound appreciation of the central role such work played in developing the moral vision embodied in their more lastingly popular books and essays.

This book is devoted to the writings of the Evangelical and Oxford movements, whose leading members were key figures in the religious debate that so preoccupied early Victorian society. The Evangelical writers included here - Charles Simeon, Francis Close, William Goode and Edward Miall - enjoyed wide influence in their own day but their writings are now either forgotten or largely inaccessible. The writers in the Oxford Movement represented here - Keble, Williams, Newman and Pusey - are better known, though only Newman's prose has received much attention. By concentrating upon the period 1825 to 1850 Dr Jay is able to show the complex social, educational, and political influences on the religious debate and to trace the dynamics of the relationship between the two movements. This book will prove to be an indispensable tool for all serious students of nineteenth-century literature, history and theology.

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the "Pink Tide" in eight national cases-Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela-the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, Maria Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodriguez Gusta, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson

Every user knows the importance of the "@" symbol in internet communication. Though the symbol barely existed in Latin America before the emergence of email, Spanish-speaking feminist activists immediately claimed it to replace the awkward "o/a" used to indicate both genders in written text, discovering embedded in the internet an answer to the challenge of symbolic inclusion. In repurposing the symbol, they changed its meaning. In Interpreting the Internet, Elisabeth Jay Friedman provides the first in-depth exploration of how Latin American feminist and queer activists have interpreted the internet to support their counter publics. Aided by a global network of women and men dedicated to establishing an accessible internet, activists have developed identities, constructed communities, and honed strategies for social change. And by translating the internet into their own vernacular, they have transformed the technology itself. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in feminist and gender studies, Latin American studies, media studies, and political science, as well as anyone curious about the ways in which the internet shapes our lives.

Every user knows the importance of the "@" symbol in internet communication. Though the symbol barely existed in Latin America before the emergence of email, Spanish-speaking feminist activists immediately claimed it to replace the awkward "o/a" used to indicate both genders in written text, discovering embedded in the internet an answer to the challenge of symbolic inclusion. In repurposing the symbol, they changed its meaning. In Interpreting the Internet, Elisabeth Jay Friedman provides the first in-depth exploration of how Latin American feminist and queer activists have interpreted the internet to support their counter publics. Aided by a global network of women and men dedicated to establishing an accessible internet, activists have developed identities, constructed communities, and honed strategies for social change. And by translating the internet into their own vernacular, they have transformed the technology itself. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in feminist and gender studies, Latin American studies, media studies, and political science, as well as anyone curious about the ways in which the internet shapes our lives.