Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk.

What was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets?

This fascinating new study by Mark Asquith offers an original approach to Hardy's art as a novelist and entirely new readings of certain musical scenes in Hardy's works.

Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence.

Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari and that of Jean Laplanche - particularly his major and as yet still relatively unfamiliar notion of the phantasme - Social Formation in Hardy's Major Novels is an original and groundbreaking rereading of Hardy's four major tragic novels.

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.

Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that sees them taking enlightenment ideas to heights never dreamed of by Locke and Priestley.

Wessex did not spring full-born from Hardy's imagination when he began to write.

For more than thirty years, books and essays on Thomas Hardy have been at the forefront of developments in academic literary studies.

Die Frage nach der Dialektik der Säkularisierung und nach den Formen des Fortlebens des Religiösen in der Moderne ist im Zuge des aktuellen ›religious turn‹ virulenter denn je.

This text explores the ways in which four British novelists used and transformed the theme of women's relation to sexual love in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Shelley's detractors since Hazlitt have noticed a division in the 'self' of his poems.

Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later nineteenth-century heirs.

Sir Walter Scott defined the parameters of the historical novel and illustrated his concept of the genre by writing a long series of novels dealing with medieval times, the Elizabethan Age and the 18th Century.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history.

James Mussell provides an accessible account of the digitization of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals.

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the 'music' of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.

This volume undertakes a fundamental reassessment of utopianism during the modernist period.

The Polish exile and the Russian villain were familiar figures in nineteenth-century British culture.

From the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth, tourism became established as a leisure industry and travel writing as a popular genre.

Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.

Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.

Considers the Indian periodical press as a key forum for the production of nationalist rhetoric.

Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader?

India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period.

An international trade emerged between 1870-1895 that incorporated the circulation of books among countries worldwide.

Featuring contributions by new and established nineteenth-century theatre scholars, this collection of critical essays is the first of its kind devoted solely to Victorian pantomime.

Taking a fresh approach to Byron, this book argues that he should be understood as a poet whose major works develop a carefully reasoned philosophy.

A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality.

This study places Kipling's fiction in its original cultural, intellectual and historical contexts, exploring the impact of India, America, South Africa and Edwardian England on his imperialist narratives.

Today's hunting debate began in the eighteenth century, when the idea of the countryside was being invented through the imaginative displacement of agricultural production in favour of country sports and landscape tourism.

This book explores ideas of violent femininity across generic and disciplinary boundaries during the nineteenth century.

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in 'autonomous' poetry's redistribution of affect.

The multidisciplinary aesthetics of Walter Pater, the nineteenth century's most provocative critic, are explored by an international team of scholars.

Starting with a re-examination of the role of the colonial/racial Other in mainstream Gothic (colonial) fiction, this book goes on to engage with the problem of narrating the 'subaltern' in the post-colonial context.

The first study of the depictions of the Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian stage, this book analyzes plays set in and dramatising the histories of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon and the Holy Land.

Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analyzing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the seance.

This revised new edition of The Handbook of the Gothic contains over one hundred entries on Gothic writers, themes, terms, concepts, contexts and locations, featuring new entries on writers including Stephen King and Wilkie Collins, new genres and a new Preface which situates the handbook within current studies of the Gothic.

This volume tackles the subject of illustration, technically, metaphorically and historically in nineteenth-century periodicals, displaying the ubiquity of the visual in the press: the articles cover material illustration, graphics, and design and metaphorical use of images in the letterpress, offering specific examples and theoretical approaches.

Privacy is not often thought of as a marker of modernity but a look at British women's writing of the early twentieth century suggests that it should be so.

Building on recent work on Victorian print culture and the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, this collection extends the frontiers of scholarship on the 'Atlantic scene' of publishing, exploring new ways of grappling with the rapidly changing universe of print at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s.

This book explores three crucial stages in Dickens' on-going voyage of discovery into what has been called the 'hidden springs' of his fiction; arguing that in three of Dickens best known novels, we witness Dickens responding to some identifiable force represented as coming from underneath the ground plan of the book in question.

The first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels uses six of his texts to demonstrate the ways in which Hardy uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through the employment of non-realistic plot devices and sensational 'excess.

This book describes the emergence of ecological understanding among the English Romantic poets, arguing that this new holistic paradigm offered a conceptual and ideological basis for American environmentalism.

A sweeping intellectual history of the relationship between literary translation, authoritarian politics, linguistic ideologies, juristic philology, religion, and poetry in late nineteenth-century Colombia.

This book is the first interdisciplinary treatment of the cultural significance of the Decembrists' mythic image in Russian literature, history, film and opera in a survey of its deployment as cultural trope since the original 1825 rebellion and through the present day.

The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century.

In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, readingand particularly book readingprecipitated intense fantasies of communion.