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The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet
by J. PhelanWhat was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces the history and development of the sonnet throughout the nineteenth-century, examining the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and a number of other key canonical and non-canonical writers.
Hardy's Geography: Wessex and the Regional Novel
by R. PiteHardy's Geography reconsiders a familiar element in Hardy's novels: their use of place and, specifically, of Dorset. Hardy said his Wessex was a 'partly real, partly dream-country'. This study examines how reality and dream interact in his work. Should we look for a real place corresponding to Casterbridge? What is the relation between one person's feelings for a place and society's view of it. Pite concludes that Hardy addresses these issues through a distinctive regional awareness.
Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890 - 1939
by L. PlattThis book offers the first full historical treatment of a music theatre that was once at the centre of London's West End. From the late Victorian period to the early 1920s, musical comedy was the single most popular form of 'legitimate' theatre entertainment. This lively account establishes musical comedy as one of the first industrial cultures and offers fascinating insights into how it functioned ideologically as a celebrated embracing of the modern condition.
The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade
by F. PotterTo better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror. From the Gothic publishers to the circulating libraries, this study explores the conflict between the canon and the twilight, and between the disreputable and the moral.
Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture
by F. RodenSame-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual identity. Roden charts the emergence of the modern homosexual in relation to religious, not exclusively sociological discourses. Positing Catholicism as complementary to classical Greece, he challenges the separatism of sexuality and religion in critical practice. Moving from Newman and Rossetti, to Hopkins, Wilde, and Michael Field amongst others, Same-Sex Desire claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.
Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621
by P. SalzmanThis book offers an unparalleled depth of historical research by surveying the extraordinary richness of literary culture in a single year. Paul Salzman examines what is written, published, performed and, in some cases, even spoken during 1621 in Britain. Well-known works by writers such as Donne, Burton, Middleton, and Ralegh, are examined alongside hitherto unknown works in a huge variety of genres: plays, poems, romances, advice books, sermons, histories, parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations. This is a work of literary history that greatly enhances knowledge of what it was like to read, write and listen in early modern Britain.
The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf
by V. SandersThis book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.
Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron
by P. SchockCriticism has largely emphasised the private meaning of 'Romantic Satanism', treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.
Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination
by Philip ShawWaterloo and the Romantic Imagination offers a new and challenging look at the cultural significance of the Battle of Waterloo, and the impact it had on British Romantic culture. Drawing on a range of approaches it aims to redefine the Romantic period as an age of inter- and intra-national conflict, thus overturning conventional notions of 'The Romantic Project', and re-writing the period from first principles. Topics covered include: the impact of Waterloo on Romantic ideas of individual and national identity, the representation of the dead and wounded in poetry, painting and prose, the work of canonical and non-canonical poets.
Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation
by J. SimonsThis book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.
Beckett's Eighteenth Century
by F. SmithBeckett's Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British eighteenth century and of the influence of its writers on his work. Reading Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gray, and other writers of this period, this study demonstrates how he was not only influenced by them but interprets them for us in a quite modern way. Beckett's uniqueness is not questioned here, but this uniqueness is shown, paradoxically, to have its roots at least in part in his native literature of two centuries ago.
Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence (Early Modern Literature in History)
by R. SmithThis study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.
Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture
by S. DonovanThis highly original study opens up a new dimension to Joseph Conrad by revealing his lifelong fascination with the popular culture of his day. Drawing on original archival materials and treating subjects as diverse as Bovril advertising, spirit photography, sea shanties, global tourism, and the new sport of speed-walking, it shows how Conrad's fiction makes a sustained response to early-twentieth-century popular culture and will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad.
The Female Narrator in the British Novel: Hidden Agendas
by L. SternliebThe Female Narrator in the British Novel studies first-person narratives and demonstrates that how a woman tells her story is crucial to our understanding of its content, for a novel's mode of narration frequently undermines its ostensible plot. Analyzing relationships between the sexes in terms of battles for narrative authority, Sternlieb argues for a rethinking of the history of the marriage plot.
Women's Autobiography: War and Trauma
by V. StewartExamining a range of twentieth century writers, including Vera Brittain, Anne Frank and Eva Hoffman, this study focuses on how recent theories of trauma can elucidate the narrative strategies employed in their autobiographical writing. The historical circumstances of each author are also considered. The result is a book which provides a vivid sense of how women writers have attempted to encompass key events of the twentieth century, particularly the First World War and the Holocaust, within their life stories.
Analysing Sign Language Poetry
by R. Sutton-SpenceThis new study is a major contribution to sign language study and to literature generally, looking at the complex grammatical, phonological and morphological systems of sign language linguistic structure and their role in sign language poetry and performance. Chapters deal with repetition and rhyme, symmetry and balance, neologisms, ambiguity, themes, metaphor and allusion, poem and performance, and blending English and sign language poetry. Major poetic performances in both BSL and ASL - with emphasis on the work of the deaf poet Dorothy Miles - are analysed using the tools provided in the book.
The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush (Language, Discourse, Society)
by John Anthony TercierHow do we picture ourselves dying? A 'death with dignity', the darkened room, and a few murmured farewells? Or in the lights' flashing, siren wailing, chest-pumping maelstrom of the back of an ambulance hurtling towards an ER? Over the last decade, the two most robust vehicles of popular culture: film and television, have opted for the latter scenario. This book examines the hi-tech death of the twenty-first century as enacted in our hospitals and as portrayed on our TV screens.
The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation
by M. ThomasThis book explores the cross-cultural reception of Derrida's work, specifically how that work in all its diversity, has come to be identified with word deconstruction. It is the first book to consider the cultural reception of Derrida's works, its accessible language and structure help to make this a benchmark amongst introductory Derrida studies.
Coleridge's Writings: On the Sublime (Coleridge's Writings)
by David VallinsThis new volume demonstrates the extent and diversity of Coleridge's writings on the sublime. It highlights the development of his aesthetic of transcendence from an initial emphasis on the infinite progressiveness of humanity, through a fascination with landscape as half-revealing the infinite forces underlying it, and with literature as producing a similar feeling of the inexpressible, to an increasing emphasis on contemplating the ineffable nature of God, as well as the transcendent power of Reason or spiritual insight.
British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)
by M. WatersThis book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made the British literary heritage a source of national pride. Women critics understood the contested nature of aesthetics and the public implications of aesthetic values on questions such as morality, both public and private, the nation's cultural heritage, even the essential qualities of Britishness itself.
Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars
by J. WatsonThis book is a study of war and the perceptions of war. It deals specifically with the British Romantic period writers who lived through the Napoleonic wars, and the way in which those wars affected the writing of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and many of their contemporaries. Watson discusses the particular fascination of those wars, and the way in which they affected a way of thinking about war that lasted until the early twentieth century.
Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity
by G. Weiss R. WodakCan discourse analysis techniques adequately deal with complex social phenomena? What does 'interdisciplinarity' mean for theory building and the practise of empirical research? This volume provides an innovative and original debate on critical theory and discourse analysis, focussing on the extent to which CDA can and should draw on the theory and methodology of a range of disciplines within the social sciences.
The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939
by J. WildThis innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously neglected area of social and book history, and explores key works by George Gissing, Forster and JB Priestley.
Writing London: Volume 2: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality
by J. WolfreysFollowing on from Julian Wolfrey's successful Writing London (1998), this second volume extends Wolfrey's original argument that a new urban sensibility in the nineteenth century had been developed which established new ways of writing about and responding to the city. Writing London - Volume 2 explores through a range of readings of twentieth-century films and texts the complex relationship between the experience of the city, the pleasures of the urban text and the solitary nature of these pleasures. The book has a broad focus, in part dictated not only by the transformation of literary production in the twentieth-century, but also by the need to respond to the changes in both urban representation and London itself. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duffy, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. The volume covers texts from the late nineteenth-century to the end of the twentieth, in a critical reading that incorporates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida.
British Women Writers and Race, 1788-1818: Narrations of Modernity
by E. WrightThis book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing.