Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

3523 products


  • Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime

    Liverpool University Press Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime

    Book SynopsisCriminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. It seeks to overturn the following preconceptions: that the genre does not warrant critical analysis, that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality, and that comparative perspectives are secondary to the study of the British-American canon. Criminal Moves challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction be seen as constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays ask how can we imagine a mobile reading practice that realizes the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations provided by crime narratives; how we can overcome restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’ or ‘popular’; and how we can establish transnational perspectives that challenge the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognize that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation. Criminal Moves presents a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for how we read individual crime fiction texts.Trade ReviewReviews'The three editors of this rich collective volume are driven by the ambitious desire to radically revise crime fiction studies, sweeping away existing prejudices and providing a new conceptual framework to the study of the genre... in a few years, this work will be acknowledged as a turning point in the history of crime scholarship.'Stefano Serafini, Linguæ &'Criminal Moves is an excellent resource for scholars who are reconsidering how they research and teach foundational texts in the crime fiction genre. It can also help readers identify ways to analyse and appreciate transnational works outside of the traditional British-American canon without confining them to a fixed taxonomy.'Jennifer Schnabel, Crime Fiction Studies'Criminal Moves is an exciting venture. [...] It asks provocative questions about the transparency of narrative. [...] It is the reader, as consumer and companion of the detective and author, who is at the core of the experience. Also, the issue of the reader’s gaze and attention are important considerations.'Fred Isaac, CluesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Criminal Moves: Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction MobilityJesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair RollsMobility of Meaning1. Behind the Locked Door: Leblanc, Leroux and the Anxieties of the Belle ÉpoqueJean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby2. Moving Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Breaking the Frame of Poe’s 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue’Alistair Rolls3. Reading Affects in Raymond Chandler’s The Big SleepHeta Pyrhönen4. Contradicting the Golden Age: Reading Agatha Christie in the Twenty-First CenturyMerja MakinenMobility of Genre5. Criminal Minds: Reassessing the Origins of the Psycho-ThrillerMaurizio Ascari6. Foggy Muddle: Narrative, Contingency and Genre Mobility in Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain CurseJesper Gulddal7. Burma’s Bagnoles: Urban Modernity and the Automotive Saccadism of Léo Malet’s Nouveaux mystères de Paris (1954-1959)Andrea Goulet8. Secrecy and Transparency in Hideo Yokoyama’s Six FourAndrew PepperTransnational Mobility9. The Reader and World Crime Fiction: The (Private) Eye of the BeholderStewart King10. From Vidocq to the Locked Room: International Connections in Nineteenth-Century Crime FictionStephen Knight11. Brain Attics and Mind Weapons: Investigative Spaces, Mobility and Transcultural Adaptations of Detective FictionMichael B. Harris-Peyton 

    £109.50

  • John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and

    Liverpool University Press John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and

    Book SynopsisJohn Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats’ medical career – including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript – and recovers the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the ‘hospital poems’ Keats wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats’ visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy’s, transformed him into ‘a mighty poet of the human heart’.Trade ReviewReviews ‘John Keats’s Medical Notebook is an ingenious roadmap to conceptual issues in the teaching of Romantic medicine; its informed annotations and originality of research reveal the depth of Keats’s knowledge and comprehension of what he had learned in theoretical and practical medical science.’Hermione de Almeida, Walter Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa 'Readers of Keats--and most assuredly not only those interested in Medicine--will find much of value in Ghosh's book. In clean, precise, and accessible prose that belies the depth of archival research that went into the book's making, Ghosh convincingly makes her case for a new focus on the medical Notebook, adding a fresh and forceful voice to those in the field arguing for renewed attention to the young Keats. If the medical Notebook "was a dynamic repository of evolving knowledge" for Keats, Ghosh's study will be one for us.'James Robert Allard, Review 19'John Keats’ Medical Notebook is well written and well referenced... A scholarly contribution to the literature about Keats, the book provides new insights and analyses of his medical student days and how medical training influenced his brilliant and remarkable poetry.'Arpan K. Banerjee, Hektoen International Journal‘There is a generosity in the care that has been taken in preparing this new edition that reveals an investment in the future work that will undoubtedly be generated by this project, as much as in its own attendant literary analysis.’ Meegan Hasted, European Romantic Review‘Ghosh’s careful explications help guide the reader through the sometimes obscure and complex medical material, while the provision of concise biographical detail and relevant intellectual context of the people mentioned is also helpful. Clear explanations of terminology are not only essential for non-medical literary scholars, the contextualisation of nineteenth-century medical vocabulary will surely be welcomed, too, by those with a knowledge of modern-day medicine.’ Octavia Cox, Romantic TextualitiesTable of ContentsIntroductionJohn Keats' Medical Notebook: An Annotated Edition1. John Keats' Medical Notebook: An Overview2. John Keats' 'Guy's Hospital' Poetry3. Keats' Medical Milieu4. John Keats at Guy's: Scholar and Poet5. Endymion and the Physiology of Passion6. 'The Only State for the Best Sort of Poetry'Conclusion

    £109.50

  • William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways,

    Liverpool University Press William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways,

    Book SynopsisThis book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.Trade Review‘For its rigorous research and elucidation of the impact of transport upon the evolving experience of landscape and tourism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa’s work offers both an insightful and significant contribution to current scholarship.’ Jules Gehrke, Journal of British Studies 'Yoshikawa’s archival work, as ever, is outstanding, and her claims are generally so well grounded as to seem almost obvious once the evidence is presented ... Yoshikawa’s book allowed us to take imaginative journeys while marking advancements in the thriving subdisciplines of Romantic literary geography.' Paul Westover, The Wordsworth Circle‘Saeko Yoshikawa in her new William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 includes chapters… with an abundance of fascinating information, anecdotes, and illustrations.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Wordsworth and Railways2. The Railway Controversy in Wordsworth's Lake District3. The Arrival of Motorcars4. Romantic Motorists, Romantic Cyclists5. The First World War and the Lake District6. Post-War Motoring in the Lake District, 1920s-30s7. Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar PeriodEpilogue: 'Access for All'

    £109.50

  • Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies,

    Liverpool University Press Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies,

    Book SynopsisMaterial Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essays gathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.List of contributors: Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, Suzanne L. Barnett, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, Emily J. Dolive, Holly Gallagher, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Mary Beth Tegan, Mark Lounibos, Sonia Hofkosh, David Sigler, Chris Washington, Donelle Ruwe, Mark Lussier.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Living in a New Material WorldKate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. BarnettI. Textual EmbodimentsDestabilizing Materiality Through Manuscript Culture in Blake, Coleridge, and TigheHarriet Kramer Linkin Affect in the Margins: Marking Readers in the Elegiac SonnetsMichael Gamer and Katrina O’LoughlinRemapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo PoetryEmily DoliveVibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an EnnuyéeHolly GallagherII. Transgressive ThingsHester Stanhope, 'Un être à part': Material Transgression and Belonging in the EastJillian Heydt-Stevenson‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings': Fictional Offspring and the Reproductions of Female VanityMary Beth TeganRevolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and ArtMark LounibosDancing with Ghosts in 'Isabella; or The Pot of Basil'Sonia HofkoshIt’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Queer: Mary Shelley, Affect, and Shapeshifting through The Last ManKate SingerIII. Materialities Sexual & AnimalVoices against the Universe: Material Transgressions in the Blakean MultiverseMark LussierJohn Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified SinnerDavid SiglerPhantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium EaterDonelle RuweWerewolf Wollstonecraft: homo homini lupus, or Romantic Beast WarsChris Washington

    £109.50

  • Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist,

    Liverpool University Press Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist,

    Book SynopsisHenry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt’s early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.Trade Review'The study of Romantic criticism has gained new dimension with Philipp Hunnekuhl’s stunning exposition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s early reviews, essays, and translations. Robinson wrote with profound insight into Kantian transcendentalism, attended Schelling’s lectures, and even met with Goethe. Hunnekuhl demonstrates how Robinson established himself as the first true comparatist among the Romantic critics.'Frederick Burwick, Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles'The genre of Hunnekuhl's superbly researched monograph is hard to pin down: it is a historical as well as a biographical work that is simultaneously a study of the development of Romantic philosophy and the study of a genuinely Romantic theory of literature that combines German aesthetic autonomy and English political ethics. What is more, Hunnekuhl unearths archival material – manuscripts such as letters and diaries – and makes it available in an appendix. Thus, this important study provides material for future investigations of early 19th-century literature at the same time that it paints a complex picture of the way that key cultural concepts are generated and disseminated in the period of European Romanticism.'Ralf Haekel, Anglistik'This monograph uses Robinson’s extensive published works to unpick the influence he had on his contemporaries and further into the nineteenth century. Through the study of an author whose interests bridged languages, this is an exceptional case study of comparative literature. This monograph leaves us excitedly awaiting future opportunities to continue exploring the complexities of not just Robinson’s critical role as literary intermediary and disseminator in the Romantic period, but also comparative literature studies.'Charlotte May, The Charles Lamb Bulletin'Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary, 1811–67, is familiar terrain for British and German Romantic scholars. Philipp Hunnekuhl’s goal in Henry Crabb Robinson, Romantic Comparatist is instead to review Robinson’s life and work in the years 1790 to 1811, thereby retracing Robinson’s emergence as a comparatist and his formative impact on British and German Romantic authors. This task covers Robinson’s publications and manuscripts as well as his social interactions.'John Claiborne Isbell, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction. Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 1. Radical Self-Education and First Authorship 2. The Godwinian Critic 3. Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics 4. Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing 5. Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Literary Disinterestedness 6. ‘Matters of Religion & Morality’: Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake 7. Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, and the Ethics of Amathonte Conclusion: Or, a New Outlook for Nineteenth-Century Comparatism

    £109.50

  • The Culture of War: Literature of the Siege of

    Liverpool University Press The Culture of War: Literature of the Siege of

    Book SynopsisThe Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.Trade Review"This book offers an original and intriguing look into the literature of the four-month period of the Siege (introducing some virtually unknown works to readers) as well as a novel exploration of the ways that literary institutions responded to this moment of turmoil.”Anne O'Neil-Henry, Georgetown University'Because the book shows the power of a patriotism which reactivates references to the French Revolution, to the people in arms, the work, although written by a specialist in literature, is also extremely careful to get out of textual analysis stricto sensu to question literature as a social activity, [...] gives new life to printers, publishers, owners of newspapers and theatres, who are the actors of this moment of exceptional creativity. [...] All in all, this stimulating book reinforces the value of a multidisciplinary approach to writing in times of war.'Odile Roynette, Contemporary TerritoriesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsPart I: On StageChapter 1: The Boulevards Lose Their TheatersChapter 2: HugomaniaPart II: Off PressesChapter 3: The Feuilleton at WarChapter 4: The Dubious Battle of ReichshoffenPart III: At HomeChapter 5: Letters to No OneChapter 6: Historians of the PresentPart IV: In PrintChapter 7: De-Modernizing PublishingChapter 8: To Make the Past PublicCodaThe Siege and State ViolenceBibliography

    £109.50

  • Essays in Romanticism, Volume 27.2 2020

    Liverpool University Press Essays in Romanticism, Volume 27.2 2020

    Book SynopsisEssays in Romanticism, a peer-reviewed journal edited by Alan Vardy, is the official journal of the International Conference on Romanticism, succeeding Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism. Available to purchase as a single issue, EiR continues the tradition of its predecessor in encouraging contributions within an interdisciplinary and comparative framework. More broadly, it welcomes submissions on any aspect of Romanticism, and especially work using emergent or innovative perspectives and approaches.

    £52.25

  • The Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas

    Liverpool University Press The Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas

    Book SynopsisJohn Hughes explores Hardy's claim that his art sought to intensify the expression of things through three main sections on music, the body, and voice. These offer intersecting and mutually informing discussions of the central drama of inexpression and expressivity in Hardys work, as it affects the various personae of the text, including the reader. Throughout, the book draws on themes in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to reveal how Hardys fiction and poetry express and represent the affective and physical conditions of mind, and their conflicts with social fictions of identity. The first main section on music incorporates three chapters that examine how Hardys writing stages musical experience as an expression of human desire and individuality at odds with the constraints of rationality, Victorian fiction form, and social convention. Intricate and extensive readings are linked also to larger contextual and theoretical issues in order to show how music as a theme and motif highlights the kinds of creativity and ethical cruxes that characterise Hardys work throughout his career. The second section on embodiment and sensation shows how close attention to Hardys writing on the topics of facial and bodily expression (and affectivity) reveal much about the sources of his inspiration, and its philosophical conditions and implications. The third section on voice offers three chapters, each of which centrally employs a close metrical reading of an important Hardy poem within its larger biographical and inter-textual contexts. These readings demonstrate how fundamental were Hardys innovations in meter to the power and originality of his work, and to its expressive treatment of his abiding preoccupations with love, grief, childhood, and the loss of faith.

    £30.00

  • Down to the Sunless Sea: A Troubled Samuel Taylor

    Liverpool University Press Down to the Sunless Sea: A Troubled Samuel Taylor

    Book SynopsisDown to the Sunless Sea explores the time Coleridge spent in Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily and mainland Italy, where he had planned to recover his health, escape the clutches of opium and gain inspiration from the landscape; however, the reality would prove very different. After his short sojourn in Gibraltar, Coleridge arrived in Malta, where he became acquainted with the British Governor, Alexander Ball. He settled into Maltese life, initially taking on the role of acting Under-Secretary. Travelling to Sicily, Coleridge embraced the island's landscapes but was shaken to find the opium poppy was an important local crop. The Mediterranean would not prove the solution to his addiction. He visited the Consul, G. F. Leckie, and was invited to stay with him at a house on the site of Timoleon's Greek villa. The poet visited the antiquities of Syracuse and at the opera house encountered the soprano, Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi, nearly succumbing to her charms. Back in Malta, he was offered rooms in the Treasury building (now the Casino Maltese) and took up the post of Public Secretary. Legal pronouncements in Italian bear Coleridge's signature. Leaving behind these matters of state, he drifted through the Italian peninsula, engaging with a coterie of artistic ex-pats when in Rome. His listless, half-hearted, and financially embarrassed attempts at the Grand Tour included a narrow escape from French troops. Coleridge's Mediterranean sojourn impacted on his life and writing, not to mention his health, which saw a marked decline, leading to his final years in Highgate under the roof of a friendly doctor. Down to the Sunless Sea is a literary reflection on the fact that the sun-filled Mediterranean was not the tonic he had first imagined.Table of ContentsThe Illustrations. ONE: Departure on the Speedwell. TWO: Strategising for Nelson in Malta. THREE: Sicily and the Prima Donna. FOUR: A Hand in Maltese Affairs. FIVE: The Grand Tourist Returns Home. SIX: Lectures and Legacy. Notes. Bibliography. Index

    £27.95

  • After Human: A Critical History of the Human in

    Liverpool University Press After Human: A Critical History of the Human in

    Book SynopsisShortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (Non-Fiction) 2022Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2022SF has long been understood as a literature of radical potential, capable of imagining entirely new worlds and ways of being. Yet SF has been slow to embrace posthumanist ideas about the human subject. The human of the SF tradition is instead a liminal being, caught somewhere between the transcendent ‘Man’ of classical humanism and the subversive ‘cyborg’ of posthumanist thought. This study offers a critical history of the 'human' in SF. By examining a range of SF works from 1818 to the 1970s, it seeks to answer some key questions: What role does technology play in defining what it means to be—or not to be—human? How do these writers understand the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature? And how can we use SF to re-examine our ethical position towards the non-human world and move to more egalitarian understandings of the human subject?Trade Review'This wide-ranging and original study convincingly shows how science fiction has (almost) always been posthuman. Thomas Connolly’s critical and cultural history of “the human” in Anglo-American sf ranges from the nineteenth century through the 1970s, constructing an expansive pre-history of the posthuman before the cyberpunk explosion of the 1980s. This is an exciting new story about the history of science fiction.' Veronica Hollinger, co-editor of Science Fiction Studies"This monograph gives a valuable starting point for considering the developments of human figures in science fiction before posthumanism had been articulated and it contributes productively to current conversations about reading such texts retroactively as engagements with the posthuman and posthumanism."Anna McFarlane, Science Fiction Studies'For those scholars interested to treat posthumanism not as a given of the 21st century, but as a development of the humanism and anti-humanism that came before, Connolly’s book is a valuable resource explaining the lines of thought in sf that have led up to, for example, the cyberpunk multiplication of posthumanism. After Human will help ground current work in contemporary posthumanist criticism by providing a historical perspective.' Lars Schmeink, SFRA ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: 'Beyond the common range of men': H.G. Wells, the OncoMouse, and the Human in Anglo-American SF1. Worlds Lost and Gained: Evolution, Primitivism, and the Pre-Human in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Jack London's The Iron Heel2. Soma and Skylarks: Technocracy, Agency and the Trans-Human in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark Series3. Homo Gestalt: Atomics, Empire, and the Supra-Human in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars4. Disaster and Redemption: Utopia, Nature, and the Post-Human in J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World and Ursula K. Le Guin's The DispossessedConclusion: Bio/Techno/Homo: The Future of the Human in SF

    £109.50

  • Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics

    Liverpool University Press Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics

    Book SynopsisPerhaps no great poet, in any language, has suffered more than Byron from being merely read about rather than actually read. As Bernard Beatty remarks in his introduction to this important collection of essays, the popular conception of ‘Byron’ still often approximates to ‘Rupert Everett with a limp’.Reading Byron is the product and summation of nearly sixty years devoted to studying and teaching his poetry. It argues that, far from being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron is serious, ethically orientated and rewarding to read. The book is in three parts: Poems – Life – Politics. Five new essays have been written especially for the first and largest section, which provides fresh perspectives on Byron’s major works. The volume continues with three of Beatty's lively lectures on unappreciated aspects of Byron the man, and three pithy essays on Byron as a complex, if not systematic, political thinker.While Beatty does not question the pre-eminent status of the ‘bright’ Don Juan, devoting a chapter to an unconventional reading of its final cantos, he argues powerfully that nineteenth-century readers, who responded on an unprecedented scale to the forceful poetic structures of the ‘dark’ Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Tales, Manfred, and Cain, were right to do so. Introduced by Jerome McGann (editor of the great Clarendon edition of the poet's works) and concluded in dialogue with Gavin Hopps (co-editor of the forthcoming Longman edition), Reading Byron is itself essential reading for any student or lover of Romantic poetry.Trade ReviewReviews 'This essay collection is a treasure trove containing the accumulated riches from a life of teaching and scholarship.' Peter Graham, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Virginia Tech‘Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics offers a dazzling series of insights from a venerable Byron scholar… Beatty’s work is most distinguished across these three sections by its wonderfully refined close reading… Beatty thus achieves something close to his subject: a liveliness and a distinctive voice that is eminently readable despite the complexity of his thinking. I can think of few higher compliments.’ Jonathan Sachs, Review of English Studies‘This superb and thought-provoking book asks a lot of but offers a great deal to any reader of Byron. In Beatty's willingness to read Byron carefully, to seek and find in him ideas of depth and significance, while being able to laugh with him, we receive a blueprint for how to work with poets who, perhaps because and not in spite of their fame, have become more talked about than read. Reading Byron should become one of the cornerstones for anyone--student, scholar, or fan--who would go deeper and pay Byron's poetry the same attention that brought Beatty's work into being.’ Madeleine Callaghan, Review 19‘Beatty is intent on tracing in the poems what he calls a “Catholic trajectory”, a learning curve that takes Byron deeper and deeper into the recesses of the human soul. He offers, among other things, compelling accounts of “the darkness of sin” in “Lara” and the unexpected orthodoxy of Byron’s play Cain, usually characterized as a sceptic’s charter... Beatty writes throughout with enviable lucidity and expository grace, while allowing himself a few moments of the senior clubman.’ Seamus Perry, Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsIntroduction (by Jerome McGann)Author's Preface1. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Types of History2. Acts of Will: Byron's Lara3. Understanding Manfred: The Sense of an Ending4. Cain: One Drama, Two Theologies5. Empty Spaces in Don Juan: A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos6. 1814: Byron at Albany7. 1816: Byron at Seaham8. 1819: From Venice to Ravenna9. Byron, Liberty and Licence10. Byron and the Paradoxes of Nationalism11. Byron as Political Icon12. Bernard Beatty in Conversation with Gavin Hopps

    £95.00

  • Literacy, Language and Reading in

    Liverpool University Press Literacy, Language and Reading in

    Book SynopsisThis volume of essays explores the multiple forms and functions of reading and writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. This century saw a dramatic transition in literacy levels and in the education and language practices of the Irish population, yet the processes and full significance of these transitions remains critically under explored. This book traces how understandings of literacy and language shaped national and transnational discourses of cultural identity, and the different reading communities produced by questions of language, religion, status, education and audience. Essays are gathered under four main areas of analysis: Literacy and Bilingualism; Periodicals and their readers; Translation, transmission and transnational literacies; Visual literacies. Through these sections, the authors offer a range of understandings of the ways in which Irish readers and writers interpreted and communicated their worlds. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, Muireann O’Cinneide, Niall Ó Ciosáin, Máire Nic an Bhaird, Liam Mac Mathúna, James Quinn, Nicola Morris, Elizabeth Tilley, Darragh Gannon, Florry O’Driscoll, Michèle Milan, Nessa Cronin and Stephanie Rains.Trade ReviewReviews ‘A cause for celebration and a strong indicator of the maturation of the field… this collection up-ends many assumptions about nineteenth-century Ireland as it grappled with literacies in both English and Irish during a century that witnessed tremendous change.’Karen Steel, Victorian Periodicals Review'The capacious key terms of Literacy, Language, and Reading allow the conceptual nets to be cast far and wide... the real contribution of this volume is the kaleidoscopic view that it both constructs and encourages.'Sean O’Toole, Victorian Studies'In addition to scholars of linguistics and language, this book will be of use to those researching the history of the book and printing in Ireland, journalism, cartography and religion. All reveal something of the social and culture life of nineteenth century Ireland.'Orla Fitzpatrick, Irish Studies ReviewTable of ContentsSection 1 Literacy and Bilingualism1 Varieties of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland - Niall Ó Ciosáin 2 Douglas Hyde: First Steps in the Creation of a Linguist - Liam Mac Mathúna and Máire Níc BhairdSection 2 Periodicals and their Readers3 The Nation, History and the Making of a National Citizen - James Quinn4 Watchmen to the House of Israel? Irish Methodism and the Religious Press - Nicola Morris5 The Dublin Penny Journal and Alternative Histories - Elizabeth TilleySection 3 Translation, Transmission and Transnational Literacies6 Room With a View: Reading Ireland in the Irish College Old Library, Paris c. 1870-1900 - Darragh Gannon7 “May God bless you and all at home”: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Irish Views on Italy As Seen Through the Letters of Albert Delahoyde, 1860-1870 - Florry O Driscoll8 “Good Translations” or “Mental dram-drinking”? Translation and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland - Michèle MilanSection 4 Visual Literacies9 From Dublin to Dehar Dun: Language, Translation and Mapping Ireland and India - Nessa Cronin 10 Reading the Hand: Palmistry, Graphology and Alternative Literacies - Stephanie Rains

    £31.86

  • The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary

    Liverpool University Press The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary

    Book SynopsisCan literature heal? The Poetics of Palliation argues that our answers to this question have origins in the Romantic period. In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature cures by making sufferers whole again. But this model oversimplifies how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. Poetics documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley explored palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.Trade Review'This erudite and beautifully written book stages a dialogue between historicist work on Romanticism and medicine, disability studies, and the emerging field of the health humanities. Starting from the premise that the Romantic period was the first to conceive of literature as the stuff of medical therapy, Pladek shows it was also the first to criticise a naïve version of that view. In five crisp chapters, she shows how writers as diverse as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Stuart Mill and Mary Shelley thought of literature as a palliative, not a cure, for human suffering. In each of these discussions, she reveals how romantic literature anticipated some of the most controversial ideas in the health humanities today, notably the notion that to be effective medicine must treat the whole person, and she also traces fascinating genealogies of a great many ideas in modern medicine that are assumed to have no romantic pedigree. The result is an interdisciplinary dialogue of the first order and a literary tour de force.'Neil Vickers, University College London‘The Poetics of Palliation offers a serious and expert engagement with the field of the health humanities as a legacy of Romantic literature and criticism. Extensively researched, it will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested the relationship between those two areas, as well as in the intertwined genealogies of therapeutic holism, the New Criticism, and certain strains of liberalism. A reparative reader in the sense proposed by Eve Sedgwick, Pladek maintains her commitment to literature’s ability to give and to model care, but without assuming that it can – or should – cure.’ Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley‘Pladek’s book reaffirms the importance of the Romantic period in its identification of the era as witnessing the origin of New Critical ideas of unity and wholeness in literature and therapeutic holism in the health humanities. It places the literature of the period center stage in debates that are still ongoing now.’ Sharon Ruston, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Therapeutic Holism: The Persistence of Metaphor2 From John Stuart Mill to the Medical Humanities3 ‘Soothing Thoughts’: William Wordsworth and the Poetry of Relief4 Palliating Humanity in The Last Man5 John Keats’s ‘Sickness Not Ignoble’6 Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s ‘Fictitious Condition’Works CitedIndex

    £30.79

  • Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and

    Liverpool University Press Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and

    Book SynopsisShortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.Trade Review'Shelley’s Broken World is a considerable achievement: intellectually adventurous, with many unexpected twists and turns in the argument and in the material. Coffey writes with distinctive eloquence. The range of reading is very impressive, but I especially like the confidence with which Coffey draws on the whole of Shelley's output, from the grandest central things to all manner of usually unconsidered texts. The close reading, tremendously insightful on pauses and rhymes, is a constant pleasure.'Kelvin Everest, University of Liverpool'A major contribution to the rich field of current Shelley studies, Shelley's Broken World offers a strongly original reading of the poet’s work and thought as embracing "intermittence" in varied ways. Through illuminating readings of less discussed poems (including "Rosalind and Helen" and "Ginevra") as well as more familiar ones (Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, Epipsychidion), Bysshe Coffey unearths a Shelley whose poetry inhabits gaps, interruptions and pauses. This thoughtful, ambitious monograph, the first critical study to engage with the recently discovered "Marlow list" (a record of his books the poet left behind on departing for Italy in 1818), establishes its voice persuasively, striking out its own path with assurance while engaging generously with criticism since Shelley's death and taking on, impressively, the complex history of his text.'Michael Rossington, Newcastle University'Shelley’s Broken World brilliantly rips up what we thought we knew about the poet, so as to start thinking anew. With wit, erudition and conviction, Coffey probes a series of generative "limit-points" to Shelley’s expression: manifest yet non-palpable sensuous phenomena that resist reductive materialisms; the revisions and deletion of his compositional process; the gaps and omissions in the poet’s personal library. Bringing together the otherwise cloistered fields of prosody, history of the book and manuscript studies, Coffey restores to us to the freshness, vitality and elusiveness that define Shelley’s achievement.'Ewan James Jones, University of Cambridge'Once begun, few readers will wish to pause their reading of Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s dazzling account of the "pauses of matter and life" in Shelley’s poetry. Displaying its subtlety, intelligence, and generosity from the outset, Shelley’s Broken World seeks to do justice to F.R. Leavis’s notorious strictures on Shelley – which, Coffey shows, Leavis in fact revised toward the end of his life – by arguing that "Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual". The book does a superlative job of bearing out this claim. Along the way, it illuminates pretty much the whole of Shelley’s life and work, as well as a host of other figures from Heraclitus to Harold Bloom. I struggle to think of another book on Shelley that combines such breadth of scholarship, subtlety of appreciation, and critical sophistication as are so abundantly in evidence here.'Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge'This richly-documented and engagingly-written – indeed, elegant – book is a highly valuable, even innovative, contribution to the interpretation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings, English Romantic poetry in general, and the influence on both of philosophical, scientific, and earlier literary works sometimes overlooked, many of which have never been connected to Shelley or Romanticism as convincingly as they are here. It is, in addition, distinctive in Shelley scholarship in focusing on his openings of spaces, interstices, and silences in his work and their intimations of a fractured world where there are gaps between parts of it, yet where those parts are still turning out towards emerging connections, like words on a page. Coffey shows powerfully how these openings suggest states of between-ness and in-distinction that really lie at the heart of human awareness and its experiences of the material world, even though those levels are usually repressed in everyday consciousness. Such "concealed life in pauses and breaks" (Coffey’s phrase) is here brought forward, first, in older philosophies of both materiality and prosody that now emerge as influential on Shelley in ways we have too long ignored and, second, in his brilliant uses of the performative aspects of poems to call attention to moments of suspended animation caught between the dissolution and the renewal of thought, matter, and their relationships with each other. This process leads throughout to perceptive close readings of selected Shelley poems that are among the most revealing we now have, ones that general readers, students, and their teachers can apply to other works by him – and by some contemporaries and successors – not directly studied in this account. It is a pleasure to recommend an academic study that is at once a stylish "good read" and a provocative challenge for us all to examine Shelley the poet more carefully while, at the same time, learning how he expanded the possibilities of poetry in ways we have not understood until now.'Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona'Shelley’s Broken World is an exhilarating, original contribution to the study of Shelley’s poetry and poetics. It reads a series of passages from such seemingly disparate poems as Alastor, Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life with remarkable assurance and deft sensitivity to how the poetry is performed by and in the reader. Its goal is not so much to provide a reading of a particular poem as a whole, as to demonstrate how "various intermittences" – "poetic, cognitive, spiritual, bodily" – are a hallmark of Shelley’s poetic practice, and constitute a subject deeply in need of further understanding. These intermittences appear in both Shelley’s prosody itself and the thematics involving sleep, trance, madness, and death that the verse embodies and explores. Along the way, there are some eye-opening close readings. The splendid discussion of the title and opening two lines of Epipsychidion is in itself a revelation.'Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland'A fine study of Shelley’s airy arts of breath and pause, as diverting as it is scholarly. Bysshe Inigo Coffey has many new things to say about the poet’s extensive reading and the way it helped shape many of his greatest writings, and he traces the rich philosophical, religious, and scientific resonances of the poetry with great critical grace. Sympathetic and sharp-eyed, in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey offers a deeply informed and stylishly written account of the many ways that Shelley’s complex genius sought, in his own words "something beyond the present & tangible object".'Seamus Perry, University of Oxford'Percy Bysshe Shelley has long been known by poetry cognoscenti as the Marmite of poets. Carlyle (whom I hate) called him "Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being" and Charles Kingsley, a founder of Muscular Christianity, compared "the increase of Shelley-reading in Britain in the 1850s to another growing female addiction, the secret sipping of eau-de-cologne". Bysshe Inigo Coffey is without doubt an admirer, who sees Shelley’s poetic intelligence and sensuous experience in harmony like no other with an especially endearing "grasp upon the weakness of the actual". Through new research in the "Marlow List" Coffey meticulously places Shelley in his philosophical and scientific milieux, tracing Shelley’s reading in Kant and Rousseau as well as in medicine, geophysics, astronomy, anatomy and the life sciences. This is a work of scholarly elegance as well as depth on matters of pointing and crux, of "great, last fragments", through the full range of Shelley’s poetry but especially Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, and Epipsychidion.' Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter'This book explores inter alia how the dissolution of the boundary between mind and matter is expressed by Shelley in his dissolution of the boundary between philosophy and poetry. In this he resembles Lucretius, one of numerous poetic, scientific, and philosophical influences on Shelley presented by Coffey with rigorous scholarship. The eloquent passion of his book leaves us with the sense that Shelley was grappling with fundamental problems, and their solutions through poetic imagination, that - even if they no longer concern us - certainly should do.'Richard Seaford, University of Exeter'Shelley’s Broken World is a piercingly insightful and gracefully written book that both widens and sharpens our understanding of the poet’s intellectual and poetic engagement with the world. Bysshe Coffey has that rare talent: an ability to combine rigorous historical research with a sensitive, finely tuned ear for poetry. In this sophisticated study, Coffey shows how the pauses, fractures, absences, and breaks in Shelley’s canon are momentous. These textual spaces reflect and express the poet's thinking about politics, society, and human life in general. This book sets new standards in Shelley studies and indeed, Romantic studies.'Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter'Shelley was a polymath, and in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey provides one of the best attempts to comprehend the range, sophistication, and meaning of the poet’s mind. Coffey’s mastery of Shelley’s poetry and its contexts is remarkable, and, more importantly, he provides brilliant readings of how the two interact. The European literature and thought that inform poems such as Alastor and Epipsychidion are thoroughly explored, but Coffey is also adept at close readings which tease out Shelley’s sense of absence and vacancy enacted by form and metre. It is refreshing that Coffey manages to take the philosophical implications for any study of materiality seriously without succumbing to jargon or theoretical wandering. Furthermore, his book is part of a tradition, and he engages on every page with Shelley’s best critics and editors, while maintaining a confident and unique critical voice.'Will Bowers, Queen Mary University of London'This study should transform our understanding of Shelley’s work. Coffey writes like an angel, and he has an ear for the detailed nuances of metre and rhythm that is rare indeed; better still, he combines this gift with a painstaking archival scholarship and a deeply learned appreciation of the intellectual milieu in which Shelley worked.'Tim Kendall, University of Exeter'Not only is [this] a work of remarkable scholarship, demonstrating meticulous research and close reading and containing numerous archival revelations that will transform our understanding of Shelley, it is also an intense labour of love that realises the continuing vitality of Shelley’s poetry and philosophy for the activity of thinking and living. [...] It is an excellent conclusion to an excellent book. Characterized by an intensity and clarity of argument, a sensitivity for both the historical and the poetical, and perhaps above all a principled defence of the simultaneous weakness and power of thought, Shelley’s Broken World brings to life anew ‘the frail pauses of this simple strain’ (Shelley, Alastor).Robert Scott, The Review of English Studies'Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody. [...] Coffey’s book will influence and enrich our understanding of Shelley’s achievement for a long time.'Michael J. Neth, Romantic Circles'This work is done with assurance by Coffey, in terms of Shelley’s relation to contemporaneous, and earlier, science, philosophy, and poetic repertoires. [...] This convivial aspect holds in a professional and not just thematic sense, as Coffey works closely within the Shelley editorial circle. [...] The provenance of the many insights in Shelley’s Broken World is impressively evidence-based. Coffey has an archival ace in the hole [...] able to pursue surprising investigations, and to shore up the grounds of several internal questions long held in Shelley Studies. At the same time, Coffey is a giftedly creative critic who can leap to his insights straight off. [...] Shelley’s Broken World’s greatest strengths are its professional content and its style, aligning scholarly argument to a temperament that redeems belles lettres through meticulous research.' Eric Lindstrom, The BARS Review‘Shelleyans will find much to enjoy and think over in Shelley’s Broken World. Coffey has a deep knowledge of Shelley’s corpus and the history of its reception and editing, and he shares this knowledge in an engaging prose style. He writes on neglected works, recounts editors’ debates about pointing, and traces obscure lines of thought weaving through the Marlow List with unpretentious delight. His close readings are thoughtful and judicious… gaps are full of possibilities.’ Steve Tedeschi, Wordsworth Circle‘Coffey shows how profoundly Shelley’s work engages with the philosophical, scientific, artistic, and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Scholarly, thoughtful, and finely researched, Shelley’s Broken World presents fresh and invigorating readings of Shelley’s poems, employing hitherto unseen archive material. Elegantly written, this research monograph is an impressive achievement.’ University English Book Prize 2022Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Matter in the Margins2. Dynamics and Statics3. Their Own Eternity4. Intermitted Song: Alastor5. Kant, Purity, and the Devil: Peter Bell the Third6. Weak Verse: EpipsychidionCoda. The Broken World

    £109.50

  • Shakespeare and Science Fiction: 2021

    Liverpool University Press Shakespeare and Science Fiction: 2021

    Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare and Science Fiction Sarah Annes Brown investigates why so many science fiction writers have turned to Shakespeare when imagining humanity’s future. He and his works become a kind of touchstone for the species in much science fiction, both transcending and exemplifying what it means to be human. Writers have used Shakespeare in a range of often contradictory ways. He is associated with freedom and with tyranny, with optimistic visions of space exploration and with the complete destruction of the human race. His works have been invoked to justify the existence of humanity, but have also frequently been coopted for their own purposes by alien life forms or artificial intelligences.Shakespeare and Science Fiction is the first extended study of Shakespeare’s influence on the genre. It draws on over a hundred works across different science fiction media, identifying recurring patterns – and telling contradictions – in the way science fiction engages with Shakespeare. It includes discussions of time travel, alternate history, dystopias, space opera, posthuman identity and post-apocalyptic fiction.Trade Review‘In Shakespeare and Science Fiction, Sarah Annes Brown offers a comprehensive analysis of Shakespeare’s presence in SF to date. The greatest strength of Brown’s investigation lies in its evidential data, focusing on explicit references to Shakespeare in SF. Without attempting to locate him as the origin of SF, Brown offers an overview of Shakespearean allusions as proof of Shakespeare’s ability to be paradoxically both more and less than other authors… this book is an invaluable resource for scholars looking to think through the ways in which Shakespeare has inspired SF writers.’ Noah Slowik, Fafnir‘In this ambitious, erudite monograph, Brown demonstrates just how much the sf genre has invested in “Shakespeareanness”… Her research, aptitude, and acuity shine through on every page.’ D. Harlan Wilson, Extrapolation‘Despite Brown’s scholarly rigor, this book is written in a clear and accessible style, and with no small degree of wit. While noting the difficulty SF authors face in trying to create a plausible voice for Shakespeare when they try to depict him, Brown herself demonstrates an admirable facility with language. While the book’s primary audience is academic, this book would be accessible to undergraduate students and probably advanced high school students, so it could serve as a useful recommended reading text for such audiences.’ Dominick Grace, SFRA ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Shakespeare and Time Travel 2. Alternative Shakespeares 3. Dystopian Shakespeares 4. New Worlds and Alien Species 5. Prospero’s Magic and Science Fiction 6. Shakespeare and Posthuman Identity 7. Shakespeare and Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

    £104.00

  • Liverpool University Press Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of

    Book SynopsisSituated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad’s geographic position—seen as strategic by various imperial governments—led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island’s literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state’s national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad’s southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad—one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago’s projected nationalism are prevalent.While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad’s nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.Table of ContentsIntroductionA Geographic Reading of Trinidad’s WestTracing a Caribbean Literary Past and the Role of the LocalDecoupling the Literary Map from the Modern StateBeyond Sugar: Remapping Trinidad’s Literary HistoryChapter 1 Traversing Trinidad’s Wild West (1783-1907)Charting the Terrain: Three MapsMapping the Conquest and the Myth of Terra CognitaUncultivated Lands and Wild FrontiersConquistadors of Sense and SensibilitiesThe Wandering, Innocent Eye/I in the Tropical PicturesquePirates, Revolution and Creole ConsciousnessChapter 2 Peeping Through the Partition (1927-1936)Modernist Visions, Porous Barrack-Yard BoundariesPrivacy, Private Property and RentThe Gynocentric YardDangerous TransgressionsResisting Patriarchy and ColonialismChapter 3 Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)Setting Boundaries, Crossing BordersPolicing the PerimeterPlaying House in the CommunityChapter 4 Challenge from the South (1935-45)Oil, Possession, Labour and the Yankee DollarOilPossessionLabourThe Yankee DollarChapter 5 The Sub-Urban Expansion (1940s-50s)Views of the Port, City and CountryWaterside Relations: the Port, Saga and SteelbandMyths of City and CountryChapter 6 From the Grassroots to Woodford Square (1962-2010)Community, Nationhood and the Politics of the LocationFrom the University of Woodfood Square to the People’s ParliamentConclusionBibliography

    £32.95

  • Eternity in British Romantic Poetry

    Liverpool University Press Eternity in British Romantic Poetry

    Book SynopsisEternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the era: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in the book seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake’s assertion of the Eternal Now to Keats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versus Coleridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternity compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlasting female suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. This monograph sets out a paradigm-shifting approach to the aesthetic and philosophical power of eternity in Romantic poetry. Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘Demand No Direr Name’: Eternity in British Romantic Poetry1. ‘All is done as I have told’: Blake’s Eternal Prophecy2. Wordsworth: Sight, Vision, and Eternity3. Coleridge and the Hunger for Eternity4. ‘Heaven’s Brandy’: Byron’s Changing Eternity5. Desire and Eternity in Shelley’s Poetry6. Defying Eternity in Keats’s Poetry7. Hemans’s Records of Woman and the Eternity of Female SufferingAfterword: ‘To Open the Eternal Worlds'

    £109.50

  • The Shelleys and the Brownings: Textual

    Liverpool University Press The Shelleys and the Brownings: Textual

    Book SynopsisThis book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.Trade Review'Rieko Suzuki has produced an intellectually engaging study which enhances our understanding of the literary connections and textual dialogues between the writings of the Shelleys and the Brownings, duly revitalizing our ideas of influence and intellectual transfer.'- Maria Schoina, Associate Professor of English Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki‘Rieko Suzuki's stimulating sequence of paired readings allow us to reconsider all four writers from perspectives both old and new.’ Jane Stabler, Review 19‘I would like to celebrate the fact that a book reconsidering the question of influence from Romanticism to Victorianism underscored by the notion of “coterie” should appear in the same year as the bicentenary of Percy Shelley's death.’ Naomichi Tashiro, Essays in English Romanticism'There is a tremendous amount of learning contained here, and most readers will find out something new from every single essay... Every page of this wide-ranging and deeply researched book uncovers an interesting connection or makes a telling point.' Brian Goldberg, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Frankenstein and Paracelsus2. Valperga and Sordello3. The Shelleys and Browning on Art, Aesthetics and Poetics4. The Cenci and The Ring and the Book5. The Triumph of Life and Fifine at the Fair6. Elizabeth Barrett and ShelleyCoda

    £104.00

  • Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays

    Liverpool University Press Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays

    Book SynopsisThis study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet’s art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the ‘poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley’s work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley’s poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet’s life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley’s artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley’s poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.Trade ReviewReviews'Callaghan reads Shelley’s letters and their biographical concerns to illuminate his poetry, tracing the shifting relationship between the poet’s poetry and life. She shows that Shelley refused and exploded the boundaries between the personal and poetic by reconfiguring life events within his poetry and drama. The boundary between the poet’s life and art is a difficult one for a critic and often less useful than close textual analysis. Callaghan makes a case for the ways in which Shelley transmutes the personal into transformative poetry with Shelley’s understanding that ‘the poet man are of two different natures’ and that the ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, where truth and eternity clash.' Tears in the Fence'Callaghan is a confident judge and writer … an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley’s often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley’s work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early poetry more seriously on artistic terms than it has been so far. Shelley’s Living Artistry will make study of his correspondence much more central to future accounts of his work. Shelley’s Living Artistry is, then, a notable contribution to contemporary study of Shelley and, in particular, provides a useful reminder of the different genres and modes in which he wrote and the often taut relations between them.' Ross Wilson, Cambridge Quarterly‘A valuable, ranging and deeply informed contribution…to any reader sympathetic to neo-formalism, and indeed any reader sympathetic to Shelley (who can be as frustrating a poet as a brilliantly incandescent one), this study will repay attention.’Christopher Stokes, The BARS Review‘In Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, Madeleine Callaghan offers a stimulating and absorbing account of the way that Shelley self-consciously stages his artistic development in his poetry and his efforts to "[transmute] the dross of the personal into the gold of art"...In short, Shelley’s Living Artistry makes a convincing case for reading Shelley’s poetry "through the lens of the letters" so as to bring into focus important aspects of his artistry and develop "a fuller consideration of Shelley’s poetic achievement".’Jonathan Quayle, English: Journal of the English Association‘Shelley’s art, in Callaghan’s monograph, is living. It is not something that has been created or recreated, but rather like the statue of Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, needs only to be touched to feel its living warmth.’ Dana Van Kooy, European Romantic Review'This is a compellingly argued book, and it represents a serious and substantial addition to Shelley scholarship. What is particularly refreshing, however, is that Callaghan is not simply an expert scholarly reader of Shelley. She quite clearly loves his poetry and is not afraid to say so, or to reach for superlatives when only superlatives will do. It is this passion for the poetry and for understanding the depths of Shelley’s artistry that drives her close reading and animates her account of individual texts. Surely a poet as attuned to the revolutionary potential of reading as was Shelley would be pleased to have found such a reader.' Daisy Hay, Keats-Shelley JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts1. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab2. ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna3. ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook4. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo5. ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci6. ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry7. ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems8. ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of LifeBibliographyIndex

    £30.25

  • The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography

    Liverpool University Press The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography

    Book SynopsisThis book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem’s philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth’s other major works, including The Prelude.Yen explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of apparently ‘collateral’ images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.Trade Review'Yen’s rich and fascinating study of The Excursion builds on Fiona Stafford’s recent revaluing of the local to focus on “the quiet functioning of local detail” at a linguistic and metaphorical level through mediated images of rural landscape. Yen works sensitively within the form of the long poem, with its extended passages of argument and reflection, to tease out “intratextual and intertextual recurrences” that resonate across the whole. Across five categories of “envisioning”; “rooting”, “dwelling”, “flowing”, and “reflecting” Yen pulls out the threads of allusion that link the language of the text into larger political events of the time, arguing for an iconographic power held in the figurative language of landscape. Methodologically sophisticated, the work both draws on and challenges the tenets of New Historicism so that, rather than displacing history, it seeks to awaken the history inherent within the allusive force of landscape imagery through a process of iconological interpretation. The writing is characterised by a remarkable attention to nuances of meaning, whilst the interpretation of political cartoons and symbols of the French Revolution grounds the argument in visual evidence. Brandon Yen’s study treats The Excursion with the respect it deserves as a major work of the late Revolutionary period.'Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature, Lancaster University.‘It is a crucial book for students of The Excursion, but its positioning of that poem will also revitalize study of Wordsworth more generally… Yen’s impressively researched book should prompt critics to return to The Excursion with fresh eyes.’ David Stewart, European Romantic Review‘An outstanding and persistent feature of the book is Yen’s seamless integration of the poetry into his prose. This creates a hybrid voice, at once presenting the poetry for reconsideration and providing an enlightening interpretation of it. Ultimately, through this hybrid voice, Yen emerges as an advocate for renewed and increased scholarly attention to The Excursion.’ Brandon Wernette, The BARS Review'The most ambitious, learned, wide-ranging, and important book on The Excursion to date, one that firmly establishes the poem as the central text in Wordsworth’s re-imagining of British iconographic tradition and his reconfiguring of the post-revolutionary landscape.' Alison Hickey, The Review of English Studies‘Yen matches the number and complexity of Wordsworth’s local details with his own. I found the iconographical lens most productive in chapter 4, where Yen explicates a political tension within the iconography of rural cottages.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Yen takes a risk in downplaying the literal in Wordsworth and in locating a “new direction” not in new materials but in new modes of reading.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPart 1: Themes and IconographyThe Excursion, Paradise Lost, and Paradise RegainedWordsworth's IconographyPart 2: EnvisioningIntroductionCastles in the AirLight and Ascent‘Speculative Height’The Wanderer's RevisitingPart 3: RootingIntroductionOak, Mountain Ash, the Liberty TreeTwo Ironic ImagesA Cosmopolitan VisionPart 4: DwellingIntroductionThe Devon Cottage and the Lakeland CottageThe Cottage of the ‘Wedded Pair’The Widower’s CottageThe ‘Cabinet for Sages Built’Part 5: Flowing and ReflectingIntroductionFlowingReflectingBibliographyIndex

    £32.95

  • The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry

    Liverpool University Press The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry

    Book SynopsisOriginally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with “the very language of men” and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians’ assertions – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – that writers were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book draws on both primary documents (such as dance treatises and performance reviews) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet's unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies of significant poems by Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Barrett Browning.Trade Review'[Tontiplaphol] offers an extended close reading of ballet's influence in the nineteenth-century novel, (as well as poetry), and persuasively argues that literary historians have missed seeing how it "relies rhetorically and structurally on nineteenth-century ballet's evolving aesthetic and significance." [...] Ballet had a considerable influence on American as well as English poetry of the nineteenth century, and Tontiplaphol's book deftly demonstrates how we might begin to see and study it.'Jessica L. Jessee, Review 19Table of ContentsIntroduction: Every Savage Can Dance: English Poets and Ballet1. Sprightly Dance and Other Measured Motion: Wordsworth and Balletic Expressivity2. Classic Pas – Sans Flaw: Byron, Shelley, and the Balletic Body3. Tiptoe Aspirations: Barrett Browning and Balletic Mobility

    £109.50

  • The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady

    Liverpool University Press The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady

    Book SynopsisSir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize. Trade Review'Jessica Fay's edition of the letters of the Beaumonts to the Wordsworths now makes possible a two-way understanding of their personal relationship as well as a new perspective on the creative relationship Wordsworth and Beaumont experienced. [...] Beaumont has left us an abundance of epistolary evidence to assess his impact on Wordsworth. In the words of Magnuson, these letters let us hear both sides of their conversation.' Richard Matlak, Review 19‘This archive of letters has not been unfamiliar to biographers, but no one has been willing to take on the labor of editing them in their entirety. We must be grateful that Jessica Fay has done so and that she has done it so splendidly. The annotation is exemplary… however; it is really two books in one. The volume appears in the Romantic Reconfigurations series from Liverpool University Press and reconfiguration is what Fay achieves. An introduction that is so substantial it could almost have appeared as a monograph on its own presents the most nuanced account yet of the Wordsworth-Beaumont relationship… [The Collected Letters] is another comparably significant contribution to Wordsworthian scholarship.’ Stephen Gill, The Wordsworth Circle‘[E]xemplary foundational scholarship… Fay’s volume also opens these intersections of aesthetics and politics to women’s voices… In Lady Beaumont’s thirteen letters to William and her many postscripts to her husband’s letters, we hear a voice that would stand her ground against some of Wordsworth’s most intransigent positions, such as his long opposition to Catholic emancipation.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsList of LettersThe Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and BeaumontThe LettersPart I: 1803–1806Part II: 1807–1813Part III: 1814–1818Part IV: 1819–1827Part V: 1827–1829Appendix I: Lady Beaumont’s Reading: Thomas Barnard’s ‘Account of an English Hermit’Appendix II: Paintings Hung at Coleorton Hall

    £109.50

  • Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine,

    Liverpool University Press Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine,

    Book SynopsisHow do the writings of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé speak to our time? Why should we continue to read these poets today? How might a contemporary reading of their poetry differ from readings delivered in previous centuries? Twenty-First-Century Symbolism argues that Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé prefigure a view of human subjectivity that is appropriate for our times: we cannot be separated from the worlds in which we live and evolve; human beings both mediate and are mediations of the environments we traverse and that traverse us, whether these are natural, urban, linguistic, or technological environments. The ambition of the book is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it aims to offer new readings of the three poets, demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary debates, putting them into dialogue with a philosophical corpus that has not yet played a role in the study of nineteenth century French poetry; on the other, the book relies on the three poets to establish an understanding of human subjectivity that is in tune with our twenty-first century concerns.Trade Review‘This excellent monograph will find a broad, enthusiastic readership in the fields of French literature and critical theory, encompassing a wide variety of areas such as ecocriticism, phenomenology, affect, and various branches of the digital humanities. The field of nineteenth-century French literature will benefit enormously from this study, which significantly refreshes the way in which we approach well-known texts (too well-known, one often feels) using ambitious, cutting-edge critical lenses.’ David Evans, University of St Andrews‘What Lübecker provides us with is a new set of readings that are additive—we learn more about the three poets, rather than necessarily needing to rethink or revise what we knew about them already. Verlaine may be thought of, variously, as an impressionist or musical poet, but here Lübecker exposes his environmental activist side. Similarly, Baudelaire may be predominantly known as the poet of modernity, but here Lübecker reveals his more ecological dimensions… This study will be of significant interest to both specialists of nineteenth-century literature and critical theorists exploring new modes of conceptualizing the literary in relation to environmental debate.’ Helen Abbott, Modern & Contemporary France‘In this eloquent book, Nikolaj Lübecker provides a fresh way of reading three of the major poets of nineteenth-century France… Lübecker, true to the ecological and non-anthropocentric ethos of the book, stays in the background, letting the texts speak among themselves, and yet he subtly performs operations, like Mallarmé, that trouble our critical certainties.’ Patrick Bray, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionTwenty-First-Century Symbolism: Individuation and Practice: Verlaine, Baudelaire, MallarméChapter 1: Haiku-Verlainei. Discrete Ecstasiesii. Haiku-individuationiii. Individuation in Simondoniv. Verlainian HaikuConclusionChapter 2: The Verlaine-Environmenti. Verlaine and the Imageii. Three Verlaine-Readers: Bernadet, Richard and Scottiii. Verlaine Todayiv. The Verlaine-EnvironmentCoda: In the Grass…Chapter 3: Affectivity and Ecology in Baudelaire’s Twilighti. The Affective Ecology of ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’: Baudelaire and Massumiii. Phenomenology and Spiritual Materialism: Poulet and Poeiii. The Politics of Atmospheres: Chambers and RancièreConclusionChapter 4: Baudelaire and the Power of Colouri. The Process-Relational World of Colourii. The Colour of the Sun: Baudelaire with Cézanneiii. Baudelaire Was Never Modern: Art as Ecological PracticeCoda: From Baudelaire to MallarméChapter 5: Mallarmé and the Individu-Livrei. The Book-Event: Politics and Beautyii. The Book as Practiceiii. The Production of the Individu-LivreChapter 6: Mallarmé’s Demonic Media Theoryi. Demonic Modulationsii. Mallarméan Individuation and Twenty-First-Century Mediaiii. Mallarmé and Cyberneticsiv. The Livre and the Anti-LivreCoda: Is Mallarmé Digital?ConclusionBibliographyIndex

    £104.00

  • Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

    Liverpool University Press Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

    Book SynopsisThe late-Victorian era has been extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this study seeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studies to the early decades of the twentieth century, which are less often seen in terms of Gothic or supernatural literature. Beginning with the quintessentially urban Gothic space of fin de siècle London, as represented in classic texts such as Dracula and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the study proceeds to ask how the themes and energies which emerge in this moment evolve throughout the early twentieth century. In the ghost stories of authors like M.R. James, the Edwardian era witnesses an uncanny return to the rural English landscape, in which modernity encounters the re-emergence of suppressed fears and forces. After World War One, London again experiences a renewal of Gothic themes, with figures such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot representing the city as a stricken and desolate space, haunted by the trauma and ghosts of the recent conflict. That legacy of violence and loss is also evident in rural representations of place in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a renewed interest in supernaturalism and paganism found in authors like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Butts. Ultimately, this study argues, this period of dramatic social and cultural change is shadowed by a corresponding evolution in Gothic literary representation, whether that is expressed through modernist experimentation or more conventional narrative forms. Trade Review‘Locating the Gothic in British Modernity is a scholarly achievement of great distinction, wide ranging, generously attentive to detail and genuinely manages to break new ground exploring this fascinating literary territory.’ Alan Price, Magonia Review of Books'[Wiseman] reinvigorates discussion of the gothic in literature by showing its persistence from the late Victorian period into the modernist period... The writing is clear and purposeful throughout, rendering the book accessible to nonspecialists interested in 20th-century British literature.'J. W. Moffett, CHOICETable of Contents Introduction 1. The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London 2. The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism and Re-Emergence in the Rural World 3. In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London 4. From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar PeriodConclusion Index

    £31.87

  • Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World

    Liverpool University Press Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World

    Book SynopsisThis collection places the fiction of Bram Stoker in relation to this life, career and status as a late Victorian. It centres on various aspects of his interests and career, such as politics, the legal system, his role as Irving's stage manager, and analyses his work in relation to these.Trade Review‘Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World provides an important and fascinating angle from which to view Stoker’s work and his fiction.’ Marion McGarry, Irish Studies Review‘Gibson and Müller bring a fresh perspective to the well-trod field of Stoker studies by examining the author in the context of the Late Victorian world he was writing… This collection of essays successfully fills in a picture of the man and his fiction, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to expand their understanding of Bram Stoker, his world, and his literary legacy.’ Jeanette Laredo, Supernatural Studies Association'Much of the pleasure and strength of this collection is in the range of Stoker’s works analyzed... Readers familiar with Stoker will find this volume filled with discussions both familiar and new that will have a positive impact on Stoker studies.'Robert Finnigan, Victorian Review'[Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World] has sustaining pockets of original research that make it a positive contribution to the critical industry now rapidly growing up around Stoker.'Roger Luckhurst, Victorian Studies'The collection overall offers a broad-based exploration of the shifting and sometimes complex historical and cultural contexts of the entire corpus of Stoker’s short fiction and novels... a valuable contribution to Gothic studies.'R. D. Morrison, Choice'The book offers enlightening insights and some fascinating detail and is a worthwhile approach when looking at the history and life of Stoker. [...] Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World provides an important and fascinating angle from which to view Stoker’s work and his fiction.'Marion McGarry, Irish Studies Review

    £27.99

  • The Pointe of the Pen

    Liverpool University Press The Pointe of the Pen

    Book SynopsisOriginally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, theprospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

    £29.99

  • After Human: A Critical History of the Human in

    Liverpool University Press After Human: A Critical History of the Human in

    Book SynopsisShortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (Non-Fiction) 2022Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2022SF has long been understood as a literature of radical potential, capable of imagining entirely new worlds and ways of being. Yet SF has been slow to embrace posthumanist ideas about the human subject. The human of the SF tradition is instead a liminal being, caught somewhere between the transcendent ‘Man’ of classical humanism and the subversive ‘cyborg’ of posthumanist thought. This study offers a critical history of the 'human' in SF. By examining a range of SF works from 1818 to the 1970s, it seeks to answer some key questions: What role does technology play in defining what it means to be—or not to be—human? How do these writers understand the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature? And how can we use SF to re-examine our ethical position towards the non-human world and move to more egalitarian understandings of the human subject?Trade Review'This wide-ranging and original study convincingly shows how science fiction has (almost) always been posthuman. Thomas Connolly’s critical and cultural history of “the human” in Anglo-American sf ranges from the nineteenth century through the 1970s, constructing an expansive pre-history of the posthuman before the cyberpunk explosion of the 1980s. This is an exciting new story about the history of science fiction.' Veronica Hollinger, co-editor of Science Fiction Studies"This monograph gives a valuable starting point for considering the developments of human figures in science fiction before posthumanism had been articulated and it contributes productively to current conversations about reading such texts retroactively as engagements with the posthuman and posthumanism."Anna McFarlane, Science Fiction Studies'For those scholars interested to treat posthumanism not as a given of the 21st century, but as a development of the humanism and anti-humanism that came before, Connolly’s book is a valuable resource explaining the lines of thought in sf that have led up to, for example, the cyberpunk multiplication of posthumanism. After Human will help ground current work in contemporary posthumanist criticism by providing a historical perspective.' Lars Schmeink, SFRA ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: 'Beyond the common range of men': H.G. Wells, the OncoMouse, and the Human in Anglo-American SF1. Worlds Lost and Gained: Evolution, Primitivism, and the Pre-Human in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Jack London's The Iron Heel2. Soma and Skylarks: Technocracy, Agency and the Trans-Human in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark Series3. Homo Gestalt: Atomics, Empire, and the Supra-Human in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars4. Disaster and Redemption: Utopia, Nature, and the Post-Human in J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World and Ursula K. Le Guin's The DispossessedConclusion: Bio/Techno/Homo: The Future of the Human in SF

    £29.69

  • The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady

    Liverpool University Press The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady

    Book SynopsisSir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize. Trade Review'Jessica Fay's edition of the letters of the Beaumonts to the Wordsworths now makes possible a two-way understanding of their personal relationship as well as a new perspective on the creative relationship Wordsworth and Beaumont experienced. [...] Beaumont has left us an abundance of epistolary evidence to assess his impact on Wordsworth. In the words of Magnuson, these letters let us hear both sides of their conversation.' Richard Matlak, Review 19‘This archive of letters has not been unfamiliar to biographers, but no one has been willing to take on the labor of editing them in their entirety. We must be grateful that Jessica Fay has done so and that she has done it so splendidly. The annotation is exemplary… however; it is really two books in one. The volume appears in the Romantic Reconfigurations series from Liverpool University Press and reconfiguration is what Fay achieves. An introduction that is so substantial it could almost have appeared as a monograph on its own presents the most nuanced account yet of the Wordsworth-Beaumont relationship… [The Collected Letters] is another comparably significant contribution to Wordsworthian scholarship.’ Stephen Gill, The Wordsworth Circle‘[E]xemplary foundational scholarship… Fay’s volume also opens these intersections of aesthetics and politics to women’s voices… In Lady Beaumont’s thirteen letters to William and her many postscripts to her husband’s letters, we hear a voice that would stand her ground against some of Wordsworth’s most intransigent positions, such as his long opposition to Catholic emancipation.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsList of LettersThe Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and BeaumontThe LettersPart I: 1803–1806Part II: 1807–1813Part III: 1814–1818Part IV: 1819–1827Part V: 1827–1829Appendix I: Lady Beaumont’s Reading: Thomas Barnard’s ‘Account of an English Hermit’Appendix II: Paintings Hung at Coleorton Hall

    £34.99

  • Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of

    Liverpool University Press Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of

    Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.Trade ReviewReviews'Illuminating and persuasive, this is a compelling and cohesive study of disability in Victorian fiction.'Dr Ryan Sweet, University of Plymouth'The narratological concept of focalization does double-duty as an optical concept [...] and Hingston’s emphasis on the role of perception in determining bodily normativity or deviance is a welcome approach, expanding our conception of disability outwards from solely a discursive category to a broader perceptual and even phenomenological concept, even in a book fundamentally concerned with textuality. The kind of detailed attention to form - not solely as a textual feature but also a bodily one - in which this book engages is exemplary for future studies of disability in a literary critical context.'Natalie Prizel, Victorian Studies Table of ContentsIntroductionGrotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de ParisSocial Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak HouseSensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The MoonstoneSanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the HouseFairy-tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame PrinceMysterious Bodies: Solving and De-solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle MysteryAfterwordAppendix: FiguresIndex

    £29.99

  • Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the

    Liverpool University Press Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the

    Book SynopsisEighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces particular cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel through the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This provides not only a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres in which women were writing during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women – Methodist and otherwise – modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.Trade ReviewReviews ‘This is an excellent, multi-layered, subtle and innovative reading of religious culture in the long eighteenth century. It points the way to the development of religious history/literary criticism, and will become a key text for our understanding not only of Methodism but of the ways in which religious discourse might be contextualised and read as part of larger cultural shifts.’Dr Felicity James, Associate Professor in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Leicester'One of the more broadly appealing achievements of this book is to map the ways in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodist women, in their fascinating publishing practices, illuminating editorial experiences, and in the very ideas and expression of their writing, resisted, adopted, and variously navigated their way around ‘a proper and regulated discursive space for women’s enthusiastic religion in British life'.Fiona Macdonald, Wesley and Methodist Studies‘....Winckles writes about both women’s writing and Methodism with learning and ease. His thesis builds on other recent—indeed, pioneering—scholarship on dissenting women in the period by deepening that scholarly trajectory through careful manuscript work in overlooked archival sources, especially in the burgeoning field of life writing.’ Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Women's Writing‘This volume’s reassessment of Methodist media through manuscript culture, women’s life-writing and scribal publication – a vibrant interdisciplinary paradigm – sharpens our understanding of the romantic world, elevates figures who have languished for far too long, and continues to decenter and redefine our understanding of romanticisms in unpredictable and exciting ways. Elizabeth Bishop, Romantic Circles ‘While the mainstream Methodism of the nineteenth century slowed down the Methodist media revolution, Winckles’s rigor and enthusiasm revives it.’ Rebecca Nesvet, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830'Winckles [...] uses Methodist women’s manuscript circulation to overhaul the field of Romanticism. [...] Winckles’s ambitious argument and thoroughly researched conclusions are mesmerizingly provocative. [...] One of the very welcome contributions Winckles makes to the field of “long” eighteenth-century women’s writing is his insistence on the value of recovering very specifically the “life-writing” of religious women [...] showing how vibrant and diverse the theological differentiation among members of a given religious community could be. [...] a sea change has occurred in the scholarly recognition of the deep resonances and complications among religious networks, eighteenth-century literature, and global feminism.'Samara Cahill, Eighteenth Century FictionTable of Contents1. Hunting the Methodist Vixen: Methodism and the Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution2. An Overview of Methodist Discourse Culture, 1738-17913. The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist4. Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life Writing5. The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791-18216. Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm7. Agnes Bulmer, Felicia Hemans, and Poetry as Theology8. Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change

    £27.99

  • Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction,

    Liverpool University Press Rough Beasts: The Monstrous in Irish Fiction,

    Book SynopsisMonsters and other supernatural malefactors disrupt the human world in distinct ways: werewolves and cunning beasts challenge the philosophical distinction between human and animal; demons offer deceptive pacts to prey upon our delusions of mastery over the world; capricious fairies claim dominion over the landscape and exact disproportionate revenge for our intrusions. When a monster appears, human history must halt until it departs.Irish history, meanwhile, has been punctured by dramatic ruptures, such as the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. Monstrous imagery flourishes in these ruptures, so it is hardly surprising that Irish literature boasts a great many rough beasts and ravenous corpses. In this book, various monsters from Irish literature are considered in different historical contexts, to illustrate the role of horror and monstrosity in Ireland’s history and culture. In both English- and Irish-language texts, from the Act of Union to the death of the Celtic Tiger, hordes of night-creatures arise in times of crisis, embodying chaos and absurdity. Building upon the critical framework established in Irish Science Fiction (2014), this study looks at the specific ways in which ghosts, malevolent magicians, shape-shifters, cryptids and the corporeal undead oppose human agency by ‘breaking history’.Trade Review‘What is most impressive about this book is the sheer range of theoretical and fictional material with which it engages. [….] It is a very welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Irish horror fiction.’ Jarlath Killeen, Books Ireland Magazine '[Rough Beasts] opens up new possibilities in both Irish studies and the theory of horror. For this reason, it deserves the attention of any reader researching a definitively Irish gothic.'William Hughes, Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: In Defence of FearWe Dare Not Go A-Hunting: Fairies, Deep Time and the Irish WeirdHarbingers of HungerFrom Lore to LawLifting the VeilJust Sign HereThe Undead GenerationsBreeding Breaks OutHaunted Spaces, Monstrous LairsConclusions

    £27.99

  • Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the

    Liverpool University Press Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the

    Book SynopsisIn the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.Trade Review'This dedication to the complex network of ideas and lived practice makes Walter Besant more than a mere love letter to a forgotten Victorian. Rather, it provides an integral contribution to the history of publishing and of literary production, and to studies of libralism and reform as they appeared at the end of the century.' Peter Katz, Victorians Institute Journal‘Kevin A. Morrison’s recent volume of essays, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, offers a timely and important meditation on the restoration of authors who have fallen out of favor or slipped into obscurity… The essays in this volume offer nuanced reflections on Besant’s marginal status, thoughtful speculations about his fall from popularity, and compelling arguments for bringing him back into the Victorian studies.’ Heidi Kaufman, Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Walter Besant Now Kevin A. Morrison Part One: Literary Collaborations 2. Besant and Collaboration Kirsty Bunting 3. ‘Another like me’: The Literary Partnership of Walter Besant and James Rice Richard Storer 4. ‘I have altered nothing’: Walter Besant’s Completion of Blind Love Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox Part Two: Reforming Authorship 5. Walter Besant and Copyright Reform Mary Ann Gillies 6. The Author Function in Walter Besant’s Fiction: the Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of Copyright Law and the Nationalist Restructuring of the Trade Alberto Gabriele 7. Besant, Chatto and Watt: a Literary Income in the 1890s Simon Eliot 8. Workers as Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s Writings Ayşe Çelikkol Part Three: Authoring Reforms 9. Altruism and The Monks of Thelema: Ideals and Realities Geoffrey A.C. Ginn 10. The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition: Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men Kevin Swafford 11. From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood: Affective Reforms in All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon Vicky Cheng and Haejoo Kim Part Four: Literary Relations 12. Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street Tom Ue 13. Walter Besant: A Latter-Day Dickens? Andrzej Diniejko

    £29.69

  • Law and Literature: The Irish Case

    Liverpool University Press Law and Literature: The Irish Case

    Book SynopsisLaw and Literature: The Irish Case is a collection of fascinating essays by literary and legal scholars which explore the intersections between law and literature in Ireland from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sharing a concern for the cultural life of law and the legal life of culture, the contributors shine a light on the ways in which the legal and the literary have spoken to each other, of each other, and, at times, for each other, on the island of Ireland in the last three centuries. Several of the chapters discuss how texts and writers have found their ways into the law’s chambers and contributed to the development of jurisprudence. The essays in the collection also reveal the juridical and jurisprudential forces that have shaped the production and reception of Irish literary culture, revealing the law’s popular reception and its extra-legal afterlives.List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Max Barrett, Noreen Doody, Katherine Ebury, Adam Gearey, Tom Hickey, James Kelly, Colum Kenny, David Kenny, Heather Laird, Julie Morrissy, Gearóid O'Flaherty, Virginie Roche-Tiengo, Barry Sheils.Table of ContentsProem: ‘Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, 2013’ Julie MorrissyIntroduction: Law and Literature / The Irish Case Adam Hanna and Eugene McNultyOpening Argument: Interpretation in Law and Literature Tom Hickey and David KennyPart I: Alternative Jurisdictions1. Saying Unsaid: Law Transformed in Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s Bloodroot (2017)Adam Gearey2. Laughter Before the Law: Censorship, Caricature and Hunger Strike in Modern Irish Literature and ArtBarry Sheils3. Citizenship and Connection in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Clasp (2015)Adam Hanna 4. Writing Law(lessness): Legal Pluralism and Narrative Structure in Emily Lawless’s Hurrish (1886).Heather LairdPart II: The Writer in Court5. Imagination versus the Law: Oscar Wilde Noreen Doody6. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum - Revisiting the Wildes on Trial Gearóid O’Flaherty 7. World War II Treason Trials and the Legacy of Irish Rebellion in Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason (1948) Katherine Ebury8. Legible Letters: The Cases of Patrick Pearse and the ‘English’ Alphabet Colum KennyPart III: The Court in Writing9. Through a Legal Looking-Glass: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and the LawMax Barrett10. Rape Narratives, Women’s Testimony, and Irish Law in Asking for It and Dark ChapterRebecca Anne Barr 11. ‘Pleading My Cause’: Literature and the Law in Irish RomanticismJames Kelly12. The Judge and The Human Hansard in Brian Friel’s TheatreVirginie Roche-Tiengo13. Moral Legibility: Dion Boucicault and the Melodramatic Legal SceneEugene Mc Nulty 

    £95.00

  • John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and

    Liverpool University Press John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and

    Book SynopsisJohn Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats’ medical career – including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript – and recovers the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the ‘hospital poems’ Keats wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats’ visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy’s, transformed him into ‘a mighty poet of the human heart’.Trade ReviewReviews ‘John Keats’s Medical Notebook is an ingenious roadmap to conceptual issues in the teaching of Romantic medicine; its informed annotations and originality of research reveal the depth of Keats’s knowledge and comprehension of what he had learned in theoretical and practical medical science.’Hermione de Almeida, Walter Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa 'Readers of Keats--and most assuredly not only those interested in Medicine--will find much of value in Ghosh's book. In clean, precise, and accessible prose that belies the depth of archival research that went into the book's making, Ghosh convincingly makes her case for a new focus on the medical Notebook, adding a fresh and forceful voice to those in the field arguing for renewed attention to the young Keats. If the medical Notebook "was a dynamic repository of evolving knowledge" for Keats, Ghosh's study will be one for us.'James Robert Allard, Review 19'John Keats’ Medical Notebook is well written and well referenced... A scholarly contribution to the literature about Keats, the book provides new insights and analyses of his medical student days and how medical training influenced his brilliant and remarkable poetry.'Arpan K. Banerjee, Hektoen International Journal‘There is a generosity in the care that has been taken in preparing this new edition that reveals an investment in the future work that will undoubtedly be generated by this project, as much as in its own attendant literary analysis.’ Meegan Hasted, European Romantic Review‘Ghosh’s careful explications help guide the reader through the sometimes obscure and complex medical material, while the provision of concise biographical detail and relevant intellectual context of the people mentioned is also helpful. Clear explanations of terminology are not only essential for non-medical literary scholars, the contextualisation of nineteenth-century medical vocabulary will surely be welcomed, too, by those with a knowledge of modern-day medicine.’ Octavia Cox, Romantic TextualitiesTable of ContentsIntroductionJohn Keats' Medical Notebook: An Annotated Edition1. John Keats' Medical Notebook: An Overview2. John Keats' 'Guy's Hospital' Poetry3. Keats' Medical Milieu4. John Keats at Guy's: Scholar and Poet5. Endymion and the Physiology of Passion6. 'The Only State for the Best Sort of Poetry'Conclusion

    £27.99

  • Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime

    Liverpool University Press Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime

    Book SynopsisCriminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. It seeks to overturn the following preconceptions: that the genre does not warrant critical analysis, that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality, and that comparative perspectives are secondary to the study of the British-American canon. Criminal Moves challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction be seen as constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays ask how can we imagine a mobile reading practice that realizes the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations provided by crime narratives; how we can overcome restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’ or ‘popular’; and how we can establish transnational perspectives that challenge the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognize that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation. Criminal Moves presents a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for how we read individual crime fiction texts.Trade ReviewReviews'The three editors of this rich collective volume are driven by the ambitious desire to radically revise crime fiction studies, sweeping away existing prejudices and providing a new conceptual framework to the study of the genre... in a few years, this work will be acknowledged as a turning point in the history of crime scholarship.'Stefano Serafini, Linguæ &'Criminal Moves is an excellent resource for scholars who are reconsidering how they research and teach foundational texts in the crime fiction genre. It can also help readers identify ways to analyse and appreciate transnational works outside of the traditional British-American canon without confining them to a fixed taxonomy.'Jennifer Schnabel, Crime Fiction Studies'Criminal Moves is an exciting venture. [...] It asks provocative questions about the transparency of narrative. [...] It is the reader, as consumer and companion of the detective and author, who is at the core of the experience. Also, the issue of the reader’s gaze and attention are important considerations.'Fred Isaac, CluesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Criminal Moves: Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction MobilityJesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair RollsMobility of Meaning1. Behind the Locked Door: Leblanc, Leroux and the Anxieties of the Belle ÉpoqueJean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby2. Moving Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Breaking the Frame of Poe’s 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue’Alistair Rolls3. Reading Affects in Raymond Chandler’s The Big SleepHeta Pyrhönen4. Contradicting the Golden Age: Reading Agatha Christie in the Twenty-First CenturyMerja MakinenMobility of Genre5. Criminal Minds: Reassessing the Origins of the Psycho-ThrillerMaurizio Ascari6. Foggy Muddle: Narrative, Contingency and Genre Mobility in Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain CurseJesper Gulddal7. Burma’s Bagnoles: Urban Modernity and the Automotive Saccadism of Léo Malet’s Nouveaux mystères de Paris (1954-1959)Andrea Goulet8. Secrecy and Transparency in Hideo Yokoyama’s Six FourAndrew PepperTransnational Mobility9. The Reader and World Crime Fiction: The (Private) Eye of the BeholderStewart King10. From Vidocq to the Locked Room: International Connections in Nineteenth-Century Crime FictionStephen Knight11. Brain Attics and Mind Weapons: Investigative Spaces, Mobility and Transcultural Adaptations of Detective FictionMichael B. Harris-Peyton 

    £29.69

  • Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist,

    Liverpool University Press Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist,

    Book SynopsisHenry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt’s early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.Trade Review'The study of Romantic criticism has gained new dimension with Philipp Hunnekuhl’s stunning exposition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s early reviews, essays, and translations. Robinson wrote with profound insight into Kantian transcendentalism, attended Schelling’s lectures, and even met with Goethe. Hunnekuhl demonstrates how Robinson established himself as the first true comparatist among the Romantic critics.'Frederick Burwick, Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles'The genre of Hunnekuhl's superbly researched monograph is hard to pin down: it is a historical as well as a biographical work that is simultaneously a study of the development of Romantic philosophy and the study of a genuinely Romantic theory of literature that combines German aesthetic autonomy and English political ethics. What is more, Hunnekuhl unearths archival material – manuscripts such as letters and diaries – and makes it available in an appendix. Thus, this important study provides material for future investigations of early 19th-century literature at the same time that it paints a complex picture of the way that key cultural concepts are generated and disseminated in the period of European Romanticism.'Ralf Haekel, Anglistik'This monograph uses Robinson’s extensive published works to unpick the influence he had on his contemporaries and further into the nineteenth century. Through the study of an author whose interests bridged languages, this is an exceptional case study of comparative literature. This monograph leaves us excitedly awaiting future opportunities to continue exploring the complexities of not just Robinson’s critical role as literary intermediary and disseminator in the Romantic period, but also comparative literature studies.'Charlotte May, The Charles Lamb Bulletin'Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary, 1811–67, is familiar terrain for British and German Romantic scholars. Philipp Hunnekuhl’s goal in Henry Crabb Robinson, Romantic Comparatist is instead to review Robinson’s life and work in the years 1790 to 1811, thereby retracing Robinson’s emergence as a comparatist and his formative impact on British and German Romantic authors. This task covers Robinson’s publications and manuscripts as well as his social interactions.'John Claiborne Isbell, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction. Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 1. Radical Self-Education and First Authorship 2. The Godwinian Critic 3. Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics 4. Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing 5. Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Literary Disinterestedness 6. ‘Matters of Religion & Morality’: Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake 7. Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, and the Ethics of Amathonte Conclusion: Or, a New Outlook for Nineteenth-Century Comparatism

    £34.99

  • William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways,

    Liverpool University Press William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways,

    Book SynopsisThis book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.Trade Review‘For its rigorous research and elucidation of the impact of transport upon the evolving experience of landscape and tourism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa’s work offers both an insightful and significant contribution to current scholarship.’ Jules Gehrke, Journal of British Studies 'Yoshikawa’s archival work, as ever, is outstanding, and her claims are generally so well grounded as to seem almost obvious once the evidence is presented ... Yoshikawa’s book allowed us to take imaginative journeys while marking advancements in the thriving subdisciplines of Romantic literary geography.' Paul Westover, The Wordsworth Circle‘Saeko Yoshikawa in her new William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 includes chapters… with an abundance of fascinating information, anecdotes, and illustrations.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Wordsworth and Railways2. The Railway Controversy in Wordsworth's Lake District3. The Arrival of Motorcars4. Romantic Motorists, Romantic Cyclists5. The First World War and the Lake District6. Post-War Motoring in the Lake District, 1920s-30s7. Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar PeriodEpilogue: 'Access for All'

    £34.99

  • Musical Wordsworth: Romantic Soundscape and

    Liverpool University Press Musical Wordsworth: Romantic Soundscape and

    Book SynopsisIn his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ must prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. This idea of a structured and complex form of ‘harmony’ was similarly noted earlier in The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music’.Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth’s poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions – Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence. Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘That voice of unpretending harmony’1. Lyricism and Musicality 2. Breath and Harmony: Nature and the Romantic Imagination 3. Repetition and Resonance: The Soundscape of Memory 4. Expectation and Surprise: From Disorientation to Sublime Breakthrough 5. Rhythm and Dynamics: Listening to Urban Poetics 6. Rest and Silence: Voices of Collective Memorialisation Coda: ‘The music in my heart’

    £95.00

  • Liverpool University Press Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies,

    Book SynopsisMaterial Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essays gathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.List of contributors: Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, Suzanne L. Barnett, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, Emily J. Dolive, Holly Gallagher, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Mary Beth Tegan, Mark Lounibos, Sonia Hofkosh, David Sigler, Chris Washington, Donelle Ruwe, Mark Lussier.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Living in a New Material WorldKate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. BarnettI. Textual EmbodimentsDestabilizing Materiality Through Manuscript Culture in Blake, Coleridge, and TigheHarriet Kramer Linkin Affect in the Margins: Marking Readers in the Elegiac SonnetsMichael Gamer and Katrina O’LoughlinRemapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo PoetryEmily DoliveVibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an EnnuyéeHolly GallagherII. Transgressive ThingsHester Stanhope, 'Un être à part': Material Transgression and Belonging in the EastJillian Heydt-Stevenson‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings': Fictional Offspring and the Reproductions of Female VanityMary Beth TeganRevolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and ArtMark LounibosDancing with Ghosts in 'Isabella; or The Pot of Basil'Sonia HofkoshIt’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Queer: Mary Shelley, Affect, and Shapeshifting through The Last ManKate SingerIII. Materialities Sexual & AnimalVoices against the Universe: Material Transgressions in the Blakean MultiverseMark LussierJohn Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified SinnerDavid SiglerPhantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium EaterDonelle RuweWerewolf Wollstonecraft: homo homini lupus, or Romantic Beast WarsChris Washington

    £34.99

  • Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

    Liverpool University Press Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

    Book SynopsisWhat did it mean to have an ‘Irish’ dwelling in the nineteenth century? How did Irish people write about, think about, visually represent or imagine what constituted home? Showcasing research from scholars based in Ireland, the United Kingdom and further afield, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring the physicality and symbolism of Irish dwellings, and the home as a place of repose, exercise and work. Using a range of methodological approaches including history, folklore and literature, this volume offers new perspectives on the material culture of home, fictionalized homes, social housing schemes, suburban living spaces, home and social mobility, institutional living, migration and memories of the home-house, and gender and eviction. Rather than focus on the Big House, which has already received considerable scholarly attention, this volume foregrounds dwelling spaces that were especially vulnerable to economic forces: the homes of the urban and rural poor. Additionally, the book acknowledges the importance to nineteenth-century Ireland of a class that has arguably received even less attention in Irish scholarship than the poor, a rising urban/suburban middle class, exploring their impact on housing and on cultural and leisure activities. An Open Access version of Christopher Cusack's chapter '"Back into the old homestead": The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 861−1910' will be made available on publication.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dwelling(s) in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Heather Laird and Jay R. Roszman I. Modernity and the Irish Cabin The Nonhuman and the Irish Peasant Cabin in Nineteenth-Century Culture Maureen O’Connor ‘Hold manfully onto your farms’: Gender and Resistance During the Irish Land War Patrick Bethel ‘Back into the old homestead’: The Irish Cottage in Irish-American Fiction, 1861−1910 Christopher Cusack II. Class Mobility and Home ‘A partition . . . making of it a kitchen and a bedroom’: Working-Class Housing in Irish Provincial Towns in the Late Nineteenth Century Peter Connell Spreading Out: Suburbanization and Dwelling-Places in Middle-Class Belfast Alice Johnson Health from Home?: Home Gymnasiums in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Conor Heffernan After Castle Rackrent: The Wardlaws (1896) and Literary Responses to Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent Patrick Maume III. Families and Intimate Spaces in Institutional Dwellings The Policeman’s Home: The Constabulary Barracks in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland Brian Griffin ‘No relatives or anyone … to take the slightest interest in her’: Insanity, Patients, and their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Asylum Tríona Waters Picturing Patients: Cork Street Fever Hospital, Photography and Childhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Dublin Orla Fitzpatrick IV. The Material Culture of Home Burying Bad Luck: Material Cultures of Magic in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Houses and Farmyards Clodagh Tait ‘The tailors generally went from house to house in those days’: Travelling Tailors and the Making of Apparel in the Rural Irish Dwelling, 1850−1900 Eliza McKee Walter Osborne and the Domestic Scene: Family and Professional Life in a Dublin Suburb Kathryn Milligan

    £99.00

  • Liverpool University Press British Travel Writers in Morocco 18561937

    £99.75

  • Late Victorian Literary Collaboration

    Liverpool University Press Late Victorian Literary Collaboration

    Book SynopsisAn exciting new contribution to the expanding but still largely uncharted territory of collaboration studies, Late Victorian Literary Collaboration is the first book-length study of the trend for collaborative writing that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As a result of the rapidly growing literary market, the years between 1870 and the turn of the century witnessed an unprecedented flow of collaboratively written novels. In the 1890s, co-authorship became a craze, with literary partnerships multiplying and fiction co-written by twenty and more authors appearing in the pages of popular magazines. By 1900, however, the trend had already reversed, and it quickly slipped into oblivion. Late Victorian Literary Collaboration investigates the factors that made the period so conducive to collaboration, tracing the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. Drawing on a vast range of original sources, the book discusses and compares different models of collaborati

    £115.00

  • TwentyFirstCentury Symbolism

    Liverpool University Press TwentyFirstCentury Symbolism

    Book SynopsisThe ambition of the book is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it aims to offer new readings of the three poets, demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary debates, putting them into dialogue with a philosophical corpus that has not yet played a role in the study of nineteenth century French poetry;

    £29.69

  • Liverpool University Press Reading Byron

    Book Synopsis

    £26.59

  • The Culture of War: Literature of the Siege of

    Liverpool University Press The Culture of War: Literature of the Siege of

    Book SynopsisThe Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.Trade Review"This book offers an original and intriguing look into the literature of the four-month period of the Siege (introducing some virtually unknown works to readers) as well as a novel exploration of the ways that literary institutions responded to this moment of turmoil.”Anne O'Neil-Henry, Georgetown University'Because the book shows the power of a patriotism which reactivates references to the French Revolution, to the people in arms, the work, although written by a specialist in literature, is also extremely careful to get out of textual analysis stricto sensu to question literature as a social activity, [...] gives new life to printers, publishers, owners of newspapers and theatres, who are the actors of this moment of exceptional creativity. [...] All in all, this stimulating book reinforces the value of a multidisciplinary approach to writing in times of war.'Odile Roynette, Contemporary TerritoriesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsPart I: On StageChapter 1: The Boulevards Lose Their TheatersChapter 2: HugomaniaPart II: Off PressesChapter 3: The Feuilleton at WarChapter 4: The Dubious Battle of ReichshoffenPart III: At HomeChapter 5: Letters to No OneChapter 6: Historians of the PresentPart IV: In PrintChapter 7: De-Modernizing PublishingChapter 8: To Make the Past PublicCodaThe Siege and State ViolenceBibliography

    £29.99

  • Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and

    Liverpool University Press Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and

    Book SynopsisShortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.Trade Review'Shelley’s Broken World is a considerable achievement: intellectually adventurous, with many unexpected twists and turns in the argument and in the material. Coffey writes with distinctive eloquence. The range of reading is very impressive, but I especially like the confidence with which Coffey draws on the whole of Shelley's output, from the grandest central things to all manner of usually unconsidered texts. The close reading, tremendously insightful on pauses and rhymes, is a constant pleasure.'Kelvin Everest, University of Liverpool'A major contribution to the rich field of current Shelley studies, Shelley's Broken World offers a strongly original reading of the poet’s work and thought as embracing "intermittence" in varied ways. Through illuminating readings of less discussed poems (including "Rosalind and Helen" and "Ginevra") as well as more familiar ones (Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, Epipsychidion), Bysshe Coffey unearths a Shelley whose poetry inhabits gaps, interruptions and pauses. This thoughtful, ambitious monograph, the first critical study to engage with the recently discovered "Marlow list" (a record of his books the poet left behind on departing for Italy in 1818), establishes its voice persuasively, striking out its own path with assurance while engaging generously with criticism since Shelley's death and taking on, impressively, the complex history of his text.'Michael Rossington, Newcastle University'Shelley’s Broken World brilliantly rips up what we thought we knew about the poet, so as to start thinking anew. With wit, erudition and conviction, Coffey probes a series of generative "limit-points" to Shelley’s expression: manifest yet non-palpable sensuous phenomena that resist reductive materialisms; the revisions and deletion of his compositional process; the gaps and omissions in the poet’s personal library. Bringing together the otherwise cloistered fields of prosody, history of the book and manuscript studies, Coffey restores to us to the freshness, vitality and elusiveness that define Shelley’s achievement.'Ewan James Jones, University of Cambridge'Once begun, few readers will wish to pause their reading of Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s dazzling account of the "pauses of matter and life" in Shelley’s poetry. Displaying its subtlety, intelligence, and generosity from the outset, Shelley’s Broken World seeks to do justice to F.R. Leavis’s notorious strictures on Shelley – which, Coffey shows, Leavis in fact revised toward the end of his life – by arguing that "Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual". The book does a superlative job of bearing out this claim. Along the way, it illuminates pretty much the whole of Shelley’s life and work, as well as a host of other figures from Heraclitus to Harold Bloom. I struggle to think of another book on Shelley that combines such breadth of scholarship, subtlety of appreciation, and critical sophistication as are so abundantly in evidence here.'Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge'This richly-documented and engagingly-written – indeed, elegant – book is a highly valuable, even innovative, contribution to the interpretation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings, English Romantic poetry in general, and the influence on both of philosophical, scientific, and earlier literary works sometimes overlooked, many of which have never been connected to Shelley or Romanticism as convincingly as they are here. It is, in addition, distinctive in Shelley scholarship in focusing on his openings of spaces, interstices, and silences in his work and their intimations of a fractured world where there are gaps between parts of it, yet where those parts are still turning out towards emerging connections, like words on a page. Coffey shows powerfully how these openings suggest states of between-ness and in-distinction that really lie at the heart of human awareness and its experiences of the material world, even though those levels are usually repressed in everyday consciousness. Such "concealed life in pauses and breaks" (Coffey’s phrase) is here brought forward, first, in older philosophies of both materiality and prosody that now emerge as influential on Shelley in ways we have too long ignored and, second, in his brilliant uses of the performative aspects of poems to call attention to moments of suspended animation caught between the dissolution and the renewal of thought, matter, and their relationships with each other. This process leads throughout to perceptive close readings of selected Shelley poems that are among the most revealing we now have, ones that general readers, students, and their teachers can apply to other works by him – and by some contemporaries and successors – not directly studied in this account. It is a pleasure to recommend an academic study that is at once a stylish "good read" and a provocative challenge for us all to examine Shelley the poet more carefully while, at the same time, learning how he expanded the possibilities of poetry in ways we have not understood until now.'Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona'Shelley’s Broken World is an exhilarating, original contribution to the study of Shelley’s poetry and poetics. It reads a series of passages from such seemingly disparate poems as Alastor, Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life with remarkable assurance and deft sensitivity to how the poetry is performed by and in the reader. Its goal is not so much to provide a reading of a particular poem as a whole, as to demonstrate how "various intermittences" – "poetic, cognitive, spiritual, bodily" – are a hallmark of Shelley’s poetic practice, and constitute a subject deeply in need of further understanding. These intermittences appear in both Shelley’s prosody itself and the thematics involving sleep, trance, madness, and death that the verse embodies and explores. Along the way, there are some eye-opening close readings. The splendid discussion of the title and opening two lines of Epipsychidion is in itself a revelation.'Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland'A fine study of Shelley’s airy arts of breath and pause, as diverting as it is scholarly. Bysshe Inigo Coffey has many new things to say about the poet’s extensive reading and the way it helped shape many of his greatest writings, and he traces the rich philosophical, religious, and scientific resonances of the poetry with great critical grace. Sympathetic and sharp-eyed, in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey offers a deeply informed and stylishly written account of the many ways that Shelley’s complex genius sought, in his own words "something beyond the present & tangible object".'Seamus Perry, University of Oxford'Percy Bysshe Shelley has long been known by poetry cognoscenti as the Marmite of poets. Carlyle (whom I hate) called him "Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being" and Charles Kingsley, a founder of Muscular Christianity, compared "the increase of Shelley-reading in Britain in the 1850s to another growing female addiction, the secret sipping of eau-de-cologne". Bysshe Inigo Coffey is without doubt an admirer, who sees Shelley’s poetic intelligence and sensuous experience in harmony like no other with an especially endearing "grasp upon the weakness of the actual". Through new research in the "Marlow List" Coffey meticulously places Shelley in his philosophical and scientific milieux, tracing Shelley’s reading in Kant and Rousseau as well as in medicine, geophysics, astronomy, anatomy and the life sciences. This is a work of scholarly elegance as well as depth on matters of pointing and crux, of "great, last fragments", through the full range of Shelley’s poetry but especially Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, and Epipsychidion.' Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter'This book explores inter alia how the dissolution of the boundary between mind and matter is expressed by Shelley in his dissolution of the boundary between philosophy and poetry. In this he resembles Lucretius, one of numerous poetic, scientific, and philosophical influences on Shelley presented by Coffey with rigorous scholarship. The eloquent passion of his book leaves us with the sense that Shelley was grappling with fundamental problems, and their solutions through poetic imagination, that - even if they no longer concern us - certainly should do.'Richard Seaford, University of Exeter'Shelley’s Broken World is a piercingly insightful and gracefully written book that both widens and sharpens our understanding of the poet’s intellectual and poetic engagement with the world. Bysshe Coffey has that rare talent: an ability to combine rigorous historical research with a sensitive, finely tuned ear for poetry. In this sophisticated study, Coffey shows how the pauses, fractures, absences, and breaks in Shelley’s canon are momentous. These textual spaces reflect and express the poet's thinking about politics, society, and human life in general. This book sets new standards in Shelley studies and indeed, Romantic studies.'Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter'Shelley was a polymath, and in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey provides one of the best attempts to comprehend the range, sophistication, and meaning of the poet’s mind. Coffey’s mastery of Shelley’s poetry and its contexts is remarkable, and, more importantly, he provides brilliant readings of how the two interact. The European literature and thought that inform poems such as Alastor and Epipsychidion are thoroughly explored, but Coffey is also adept at close readings which tease out Shelley’s sense of absence and vacancy enacted by form and metre. It is refreshing that Coffey manages to take the philosophical implications for any study of materiality seriously without succumbing to jargon or theoretical wandering. Furthermore, his book is part of a tradition, and he engages on every page with Shelley’s best critics and editors, while maintaining a confident and unique critical voice.'Will Bowers, Queen Mary University of London'This study should transform our understanding of Shelley’s work. Coffey writes like an angel, and he has an ear for the detailed nuances of metre and rhythm that is rare indeed; better still, he combines this gift with a painstaking archival scholarship and a deeply learned appreciation of the intellectual milieu in which Shelley worked.'Tim Kendall, University of Exeter'Not only is [this] a work of remarkable scholarship, demonstrating meticulous research and close reading and containing numerous archival revelations that will transform our understanding of Shelley, it is also an intense labour of love that realises the continuing vitality of Shelley’s poetry and philosophy for the activity of thinking and living. [...] It is an excellent conclusion to an excellent book. Characterized by an intensity and clarity of argument, a sensitivity for both the historical and the poetical, and perhaps above all a principled defence of the simultaneous weakness and power of thought, Shelley’s Broken World brings to life anew ‘the frail pauses of this simple strain’ (Shelley, Alastor).Robert Scott, The Review of English Studies'Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody. [...] Coffey’s book will influence and enrich our understanding of Shelley’s achievement for a long time.'Michael J. Neth, Romantic Circles'This work is done with assurance by Coffey, in terms of Shelley’s relation to contemporaneous, and earlier, science, philosophy, and poetic repertoires. [...] This convivial aspect holds in a professional and not just thematic sense, as Coffey works closely within the Shelley editorial circle. [...] The provenance of the many insights in Shelley’s Broken World is impressively evidence-based. Coffey has an archival ace in the hole [...] able to pursue surprising investigations, and to shore up the grounds of several internal questions long held in Shelley Studies. At the same time, Coffey is a giftedly creative critic who can leap to his insights straight off. [...] Shelley’s Broken World’s greatest strengths are its professional content and its style, aligning scholarly argument to a temperament that redeems belles lettres through meticulous research.' Eric Lindstrom, The BARS Review‘Shelleyans will find much to enjoy and think over in Shelley’s Broken World. Coffey has a deep knowledge of Shelley’s corpus and the history of its reception and editing, and he shares this knowledge in an engaging prose style. He writes on neglected works, recounts editors’ debates about pointing, and traces obscure lines of thought weaving through the Marlow List with unpretentious delight. His close readings are thoughtful and judicious… gaps are full of possibilities.’ Steve Tedeschi, Wordsworth Circle‘Coffey shows how profoundly Shelley’s work engages with the philosophical, scientific, artistic, and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Scholarly, thoughtful, and finely researched, Shelley’s Broken World presents fresh and invigorating readings of Shelley’s poems, employing hitherto unseen archive material. Elegantly written, this research monograph is an impressive achievement.’ University English Book Prize 2022Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Matter in the Margins2. Dynamics and Statics3. Their Own Eternity4. Intermitted Song: Alastor5. Kant, Purity, and the Devil: Peter Bell the Third6. Weak Verse: EpipsychidionCoda. The Broken World

    £29.99

  • George Moore: Spheres of Influence

    Liverpool University Press George Moore: Spheres of Influence

    Book SynopsisThis invigorating volume explores the literary worlds inhabited by the pioneering Irish author George Moore (1852–1933). With an eye to Moore’s innovative embrace of visual art, feminism and literary history, and in the spirit of his feisty resistance to ‘orthodoxy’, it investigates his influences and inventive strategies in novel, short story and memoir. Amongst the names emerging from the disparate spheres of impressionism, literary coteries, the paratextual and the music world are those of Manet, Mallarmé, Wilde, Héloïse, Elgar and Bourdieu, all with Moorian links. Contested depictions of religion and nationalism simmer; France and French influences encompass fin-de-siècle stories and medieval texts; epistolary details evidence vital parental support; contemporary authors write back to Moore. These voyages of discovery enter the fields of feminist scholarship and the New Woman, life writing and letters, fin-de-siècle aesthetics, intersections between art, music and literature, and literary transitions from Victorian to Modern. Valuably, the authors suggest numerous opportunities for additional research in these areas, as well as within Moore studies. This collection, with contributions from an international set of established and new scholars, delivers fresh and original findings as it builds on the substantial and ever-growing corpus of Moore studies.Trade Review‘This collection conveys the spirit of an active scholarly community. Moore’s relationship with women excites a frenzy of attention – a complex case, and interesting to clarify. Often, a contributor spots George Moore in a contemporary’s writing, or notices how a motif from Moore is countered in a work by a contemporary. Overall, a fascinating fusion of scholarship, truly international.’ Adrian Frazier, Professor Emeritus at the University of Galway and author of George Moore: 1852–1933Table of ContentsIntroduction I. Artistic Influences and Approaches The French Artist as Father, Muse and Rival in Memoirs of My Dead Life Ann Heilmann “Superfluous” Irish Gentry: Moore and Turgenev Márta Pellérdi Literature, Music, Art and the Salon: George Moore’s Perennial Courting of Creativity Mary Pierse The Prefaces of George Moore: Enigma Variations Kathi R. Griffin II. Cherchez la Femme? Sphinxes without Secrets: Oscar Wilde, George Moore and the Woman Question Nathalie Saudo Welby George Moore, London ‘Literary Ladies’, Networks, and New Artistic Impulses Kathryn Laing The “Puzzle” of Gladys Parrish’s Carfrae’s Comedy and George Moore’s Evelyn Innes: Some Intertextual Connections Brendan Fleming III. France: Fiction and Letters Between France and Ireland: How George Moore and Helen Waddell used Héloïse and Abélard George Hughes A French Train of Thought in ‘Two Men, a Railway Story’: From Impressionism to Expressionism Michel Brunet Epistolary Truths: ‘How one runs to ones mother when in trouble’ Maggie Breslin IV. Politics, Religion and Nationality George Moore and Decadent Catholicism: a Case Study of Evelyn Innes Claire Masurel Murray George Moore’s Irish Catholic Characters With ‘English’ Names David Clare Appropriating George Moore: J.O. Hannay’s The Seething Pot Conor Montague

    £110.00

  • Educating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning

    Liverpool University Press Educating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning

    Book SynopsisEducating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning in the Anglo-Classical Academy, 1770-1850 explores how the public and endowed grammar schools and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge trained some of the most important writers, critics, and public figures of the Romantic period. These institutions are recognized here as intentional partners and are discussed collectively as the “Anglo-classical academy”. The book shows how they not only schooled students in “classics, maths, and divinity” but also in accepted social behaviours, cultural values, political beliefs, and literary tastes. In so doing, this academy gave shape to the literature and spirit of the age. By discussing the schools and the universities together and by focusing upon pedagogies and daily life as well as the texts and topics studied, this book shows as no other has done how writers and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became such fluent linguists, skilled prosodists, and perceptive critics. As each chapter explores and comments upon the relational, intellectual, and cultural aspects of the Anglo-classical educational experience, it directs readers’ attention to the ways in which this information can be used to reread texts, reassess certain Romantics’ literary careers, and launch new lines of research.Table of ContentsPreface Introduction England’s Public and Grammar Schools: First Lessons England’s Public and Grammar Schools: Lessons in Grammar, Memory, and Composition England’s Public and Grammar Schools: Lessons in Classical Literature, Rhetoric, Oratory, and Composition Training Religious Instruction and Worship in the Anglo-Classical Academy Oxford and Cambridge in the Romantic Period: “Operose ignorance” or “Good habits, and the principles of virtue and wisdom”? University Life The Curriculum of the English “Confessional” University: Heroes, Shepherds, and “Holding acquaintance with the stars" Pedagogies of Oxford and Cambridge in the Georgian Period The Educators of Oxford and Cambridge in the Georgian Period Leadership at Oxford and Cambridge Conclusions

    £110.00

© 2026 Book Curl

    • American Express
    • Apple Pay
    • Diners Club
    • Discover
    • Google Pay
    • Maestro
    • Mastercard
    • PayPal
    • Shop Pay
    • Union Pay
    • Visa

    Login

    Forgot your password?

    Don't have an account yet?
    Create account