This study of the literary culture in Britain in the years after Waterloo begins with an account of two fatal duels, the famous duel of 16 February 1821, in which John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, fell, and the less well known duel of 26 March 1822, in which Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer, was killed. These duels, Richard Cronin suggests, bring into sharp focus the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Waterloo. The book ranges widely but at its centre are the three literary phenomena that best define the period: Walter Scott's novels, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It was a culture constituted not by the doctrine of sympathy that its leading writers held in common but by the antagonisms that divided them, a culture in which England vied with Scotland, literary and political principles converged, and there was a volatile relationship between the public and the private. These were the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and literature came to be decisively identified with print rather than with manuscript. Its most prized cultural products were miscellaneous. Superficial, even heartless, responses to the world were valued. Male writers responded aggressively to the threat that literature might be a kind of writing largely consumed by women and increasingly produced by them. This was the culture that writers such as Wordsworth repudiated, but the relationship between the culture that Wordsworth represented and the culture that he opposed, like the relationship between duellists, was at once violently aggressive and mutually supportive: each, as many writers of the period recognized, was dependent on the other.

The Robert Browning volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning to offer a wide selection of work written throughout Browning's career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died. The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the volume also constitutes a kind of biography. It reveals a poet who began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment throughout a writing career of more than fifty years. Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues, and the dramatic monologues are fully represented in this volume, but he was also a narrative poet, a poet of philosophical reflection, and a poet who fashioned an extraordinary variety of lyric measures. This volume reveals Browning as a far more versatile poet than he is often taken to be. There are two important prose items, an essay on Shelley and a letter to Ruskin which clarify Browning's intellectual stance. The Notes include brief headnotes to each poem followed by detailed annotation. Browning is often a difficult poet, and the notes are designed to assist the reader to arrive at a full understanding of the poems. The volume also includes a general introduction and a detailed chronology of Browning's life and times.

1798 is a significant date in literary history: in that year the Lyrical Ballads were published anonymously by Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller. But this is a volume not about the Lyrical Ballads , but about their year. It is an attempt to re-create and examine the literary culture of 1798, the culture on which Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to make their 'experiment'. It is a book in which Wordsworth and Coleridge vie for attention, as they did in 1798, with many other writers, including Schleiermacher, John Thelwall, Mary Hays, the Abbe Barruel, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Malthus, Joanna Baillie, George Canning, Robert Sothey and the Reverend T.J. Mathias. The chapters of this book work together to define a single historical moment that marked the beginning of romanticism in England.

George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith's novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote-arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith's novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith's personal side-including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages-as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.

This book investigates what happens to the English language when it seeks to accommodate India and what happens to India when it is accommodated within the language of a far-off European country. It explores the work of writers from Kipling to Salman Rushdie, Ghandhi to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The author is concerned with writers who have set themselves an impossible task and try to carry it out with the wrong tools, writers who seek to enclose the unimaginable diversity of India within books of a few hundred pages written in a language that is scarely Indian at all. He shows that to write about India in Englsih is an excercise in futility, but an exercise that has produced some of the most exciting and moving literary work of this century.

A selection of Anti-Jacobin novels reprinted in full with annotations. The set includes works by male and female writers holding a range of political positions within the Anti-Jacobin camp, and represents the French Revolution, American Revolution, Irish Rebellion and political unrest in Scotland.

Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel, with a hidden plot, the full implications of which are only revealed by a second reading. It is here presented for the first time with a full scholarly apparatus. The text retains the spelling and the punctuation of the first edition of 1816, allowing readers to see the novel as Austen's contemporaries first encountered it. This volume, first published in 2005, provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life and an authoritative textual apparatus.

This book investigates what happens to the English language when it seeks to accommodate India and what happens to India when it is accommodated within the language of a far-off European country. It explores the work of writers from Kipling to Salman Rushdie, Ghandhi to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith's novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote-arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith's novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith's personal side-including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages-as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.

Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel, with a hidden plot, the full implications of which are only revealed by a second reading. It is here presented for the first time with a full scholarly apparatus. The text retains the spelling and the punctuation of the first edition of 1816, allowing readers to see the novel as Austen's contemporaries first encountered it. This volume, first published in 2005, provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life and an authoritative textual apparatus.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of Robert Browning (1812-1889). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning's poetry. It presents work written across the breadth of his career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died. The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the volume also constitutes a kind of biography that enables students to understand Browning's development over the course of his life. The edition reveals a poet who began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment throughout a writing career of more than fifty years. Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues, and the dramatic monologues are fully represented in this volume, but he was also a narrative poet, a poet of philosophical reflection, and a poet who fashioned an extraordinary variety of lyric measures. This volume reveals Browning as a far more versatile poet than he is often taken to be. There are two important prose items, an essay on Shelley and a letter to Ruskin which clarify Browning's intellectual stance. The Notes include brief headnotes to each poem followed by detailed annotation, and they assist the reader in developing a full understanding of these masterful poems. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browning, and a Chronology.

This "Companion" brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.
Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems
Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts.
Explores the relationships between work by different poets
Recalls attention to a considerable body of poetry that has fallen into neglect
Essays are informed by recent developments in textual and cultural theory
Considers Victorian women poets in every chapter