Enormous social changes during the Victorian era inspired some of the finest novels in the English language. In the final decades of the century, rigid application of gender rules and class hierarchies began to relax. Consciousness of the injustice of class- and gender-based discrimination was growing. Meanwhile, bias against nonwhite peoples was worsening. The British used scientific racism to justify their relentless expansion in Africa and Asia. Viewing Victorian literature through the lens of these social changes gives the modern reader a fresh way to interpret the novels and to appreciate their relevance to contemporary issues. Nineteenth-century novelists deployed realism, satire, and the bildungsroman to resist or support leading ideologies of their time, including the separate spheres doctrine and British supremacism. Each chapter is an elaboration of the author's university lectures about Victorian classics. The tone is scholarly yet conversational, directed to the undergraduate student as well as the general reader or Victoriaphile. The text presents concepts in interdisciplinary social studies, discusses the uses of genre for rhetorical and social purposes, and exposes paradoxes of the era. The coherent style, abundant examples, discussion questions, and literary glossary make this book a valuable supplement for readers of the Victorian novel.

This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's novel illustrates the melancholy of gender and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's novel contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalise this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's novel pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's novel takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's novel satirises the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.

When Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs as written texts to be read and reread. At the center of these insights are two distinct ways of learning to read in the dialogs. One approach that appears in the Statesman, Sophist, and Protagoras, treats learning to read as a top-down affair, in which authoritative teachers lead students to true beliefs. Another, recommended by Socrates, encourages trial and error and the formation of beliefs based on students' own fallible experiences. In all of these dialogs, learning to read is likened to coming to know or understand something. Given Plato's repeated presentation of the analogy between reading and coming to know, what can these two approaches tell us about his dialogs' representations of philosophy and politics? With Poetic Justice, Jill Frank overturns the conventional view that the Republic endorses a hierarchical ascent to knowledge and the authoritarian politics associated with that philosophy. When learning to read is understood as the passive absorption of a teacher's beliefs, this reflects the account of Platonic philosophy as authoritative knowledge wielded by philosopher kings who ruled the ideal city. When we learn to read by way of the method Socrates introduces in the Republic, Frank argues, we are offered an education in ethical and political self-governance, one that prompts citizens to challenge all claims to authority, including those of philosophy.

Originally published in Italian as Lorizzonte mobile: spazio e luoghi nella narrativa di D.H. Lawrence in 1998, this critical study analyzes the work of D.H. Lawrence in light of new theories about space and location, or place and community. This approach is especially useful in examining Lawrence, as place and space are central aspects of all of his work. The introductory chapter explains the theoretical premises, drawing extensively from anthropology especially insofar as the relationship between culture and nature or community and place are concerned. This chapter also offers theories based on semiotics, sociological concerns and recent research in human geography and environmentalism. Succeeding chapters analyze functional aspects of place and space in D.H. Lawrences work. Lawrence's major novels and stories provide the main focus of this book, but attention is also paid to lesser-known texts, both fiction and nonfiction. This work provides a new approach to studies on D.H. Lawrence, opening up new insights for both scholars and students alike.

The comic archetype of the Little Man-a "nobody" who stands up to unfairness-is central to the films of Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin. Portraying the alienation of life in an indifferent world with a mix of pathos, irony and slapstick, both adopted absurdist characters-Chaplin's bumbling yet clever Tramp with his shabby clothes, and Allen's Fool with his silly witticisms and proclivity to fall in love too quickly. Both men were auteurs who managed to retain creative control of their work and achieve worldwide popularity. Both shared an attraction to young women. Drawing on psychoanalysis and gender-studies, this book explores their films as barometers of their respective cultural moments, marking the shift between modernism and postmodernism.

Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato's kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors' speech acts even as they are tethered to his. Plato's Republic and Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod: the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. In the Protagoras, Socrates takes apart a poem attributed to Simonides and uses this to finish off the famous and supposedly dangerous sophist, Protagoras. Couch City is a close reading of the comic procedures Socrates deploys against Protagoras as he reduces him to silence. But it also shows that Socrates takes the danger posed by Protagoras and his fellow sophists seriously. Even if they are represented as buffoons, sophists are among the charismatic authority figures-poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, and lawgivers-who promote views harmful to Athenian democracy. Socrates uses Simonides's poem to show how sophists not only practice misinterpretation but are unable to defend against it. Berger ports his roots as a pioneering literary theorist into this rhetorical discussion, balancing ideas such as speech-act theory with hard-nosed philology. The result is a provocative and counterintuitive reassessment of Plato's engagement with democracy.

In January 1921, D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda visited Sardinia. Although the trip lasted only nine days, Lawrence wrote an intriguing account of Sicilian life that not only evokes the place, people, local customs and wildlife but is also deeply revealing about the writer himself.

Studded with metaphoric and symbolic descriptions, the book is transfused with the author’s anger and joy. His prejudices and his political prophecies, make Sea and Sardinia a unique and dynamic piece of travel writing.

This edition restores censored passages and corrects corrupt textual readings to reveal for the first time the book Lawrence himself called ‘A marvel of veracity’.

Offering an ancient education for our times, Jill Frank's "A Democracy of Distinction" interprets Aristotle's writings in a way that reimagines the foundations, aims, and practices of politics, ancient and modern. Concerned especially with the work of making a democracy of distinction, Frank shows that such a democracy requires freedom and equality achieved through the exercise of virtue.
Moving back and forth between Aristotle's writings and contemporary legal and political theory, Frank breathes new life into our conceptions of property, justice, and law by viewing them not only as institutions but as dynamic activities as well. Frank's innovative approach to Aristotle stresses his appreciation of the tensions and complexities of politics so that we might rethink and reorganize our own political ideas and practices. "A Democracy of Distinction" will be of enormous value to classicists, political scientists, and anyone interested in revitalizing democratic theory and practice.

Do we believe the law good because it is just, or is it just because we think it is good? This collection of essays addresses the relationship of justice to law through the works of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and the Islamic thinker al Farabi. The issues explored include the foundations of our understanding of justice; the foundation of authority of law; the relative merits of the rule of law versus the authority of a wise and just king; the uneasy relationship between particular laws and the general notion of justice (equity); various aspects of justice (reciprocity, proportionality) and their application in law; and the necessity of the rule of law to the goodness and success of a political order. The distinguished contributors often make explicit comparisons to modern situations and contemporary debates. This book will be valuable for those interested in classical political theory, political philosophy, and law.

Do we believe the law good because it is just, or is it just because we think it is good? This collection of essays addresses the relationship of justice to law through the works of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and the Islamic thinker al Farabi. The issues explored include the foundations of our understanding of justice; the foundation of authority of law; the relative merits of the rule of law versus the authority of a wise and just king; the uneasy relationship between particular laws and the general notion of justice (equity); various aspects of justice (reciprocity, proportionality) and their application in law; and the necessity of the rule of law to the goodness and success of a political order. The distinguished contributors often make explicit comparisons to modern situations and contemporary debates. This book will be valuable for those interested in classical political theory, political philosophy, and law.