Through close engagement with the work of Wordsworth, Austen, and Byron, The History of Missed Opportunities posits that the everyday first emerged as a distinct category of experience, or first became thinkable, in the Romantic period. Conceived here as something overlooked and only noticed in retrospect, the everyday not only becomes subject matter for Romanticism, it also structures Romantic poetry, prose, and writing habits. Because the everyday is not noticed the first time around, it comes to be thought of as a missed opportunity, a possible world that was not experienced or taken advantage of and of whose history—or lack thereof—writers become acutely conscious. Consciousness of the everyday also entails a new relationship to time, as the Romantics turn to the history of what might have been. In recounting Romanticism's interest in making things recurrently present, in recovering a past of what was close at hand yet underappreciated, William H. Galperin positions the Romantics as precursors to twentieth-century thinkers of the everyday, including Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, and Cavell. He attends to Romantic discourse that works at cross purposes with standard accounts of both Romanticism and Romantic subjectivity. Instead of individualizing or turning inward, the Romantics' own discourse depersonalizes or exhibits a confrontation with thing-ness and the material world.

Jane Austen
"Persuasion"
A Longman Cultural Edition
Editor: William Galperin Series Editor: Susan J. Wolfson

Affordably priced, Longman Cultural Editions present classic works in provocative and illuminating contexts-cultural, critical, and literary. Each Longman Cultural Edition consists of the complete text of a key literary work, supplemented by helpful annotations and followed by contextual materials that reveal the conversations and controversies of its historical moment.

"Beowulf"
Anonymous/Sarah Anderson
(c) 2004 - 272 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-10720-9

"Emma"
Jane Austen/Frances Ferguson
(c) 2006 - 448 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-22504-X

"Northanger Abbey"
Jane Austen/Marilyn Gaull
(c) 2005 - 272 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-20208-2

"Pride and Prejudice "
Jane Austen/Claudia Johnson/Susan Wolfson
(c) 2003 - 464 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-10507-9

"Wuthering Heights"
Emily Bronte/Alison Booth
(c) 2008 - 450 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-21298-3

"Heart of Darkness, The Man Who Would Be King," and Other Works on Empire
Joseph Conrad/Rudyard Kipling/David Damrosch
(c) 2007 - 300 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-36467-8

"Hard Times"
Charles Dickens/Jeff Nunokawa/Gage McWeeny
(c) 2004 - 350 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-10721-7

Coming Soon! "The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews"
Henry Fielding/Andrew Potkay
(c) 2008 - 368 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-20937-0

"John Keats"
John Keats/Susan Wolfson
(c) 2007 - 650 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-23616-5

Coming Soon! "The Monk"
Matthew Lewis/Michael Eberle-Sinatra
(c) 2008 - 350 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-27591-8

Coming Soon! "Antony and Cleopatra"
William Shakespeare/David Quint
(c) 2008 - 300 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-19874-3

"Hamlet," Second Edition
William Shakespeare/Constance Jordan
(c) 2005 - 264 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-31729-7

"Henry IV, Parts I & II"
William Shakespeare/Ronald Levao
(c) 2007 - 288 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-18274-X

"King Lear "
William Shakespeare/Claire McEachern
(c) 2005 - 258 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-10722-5

"The Merchant of Venice"
William Shakespeare/Lawrence Danson
(c) 2005 - 288 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-16419-9

"Othello and The Tragedy of Mariam"
William Shakespeare/Clare Carroll
(c) 2003 - 306 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-09699-1

"Frankenstein," Second Edition
Mary Shelley/Susan Wolfson
(c) 2007 - 400 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-39953-6

"The Castle of Otranto" and "The Man of Feeling"
Horace Walpole/Henry MacKenzie/Laura Mandell
(c) 2007 - 300 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-39892-0

"The Picture of Dorian Gray"
Oscar Wilde/Andrew Elfenbein
(c) 2007 - 460 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-42713-0

"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," and "The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria "
Mary Wollstonecraft/Anne Mellor/Noelle Chao
(c) 2007 - 500 pages - Paper - ISBN 0-321-18273-1

On the current battlefield of cultural criticism and production, no term has been more vigorously contested than 'postmodernism'. Defying clear definition, yet persisting as an indispensable category, it has become one of the central topics in the theory and practice of contemporary culture. Postmodernism and Its Discontents collects some of the major theoretical statements in this debate, including the key intervention of Fredric Jameson, and pits them against original contributions by a range of younger writers who explore the terrain of postmodernism in a variety of cultural practices. Essays on poetry and punk culture, recent American fiction, rock videos, Hollywood and foreign film, and sports and soap operas complement more directly theoretical pieces which tackle, to repeat the title of one essay, 'what is at stake in the debate on postmodernism.' Above all, this collection is distinguished by its steadfast refusal to elide the determinate political issues posed by postmodernism. Each of the essays insists upon the materiality of cultural production, locating various post-modernist practices in the social conditions of contemporary life, including the overarching structures of gender and class.