Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

Book SynopsisLewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is a cultural phenomenon. First published in 1865, it has never been out of print and has been translated into 170 languages. But why does it have such enduring and universal appeal for both adults and children? Beginning by plunging the reader into the spectacular new wonderland of acclaimed illustrator Kristjana S. Williams, Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser goes on to explore how Lewis Carroll's celebrated Alice books have fuelled creative minds for over 150 Years. This unique publication takes us on a journey whose scope ranges from art, literature, theatre and film through science and technology to fashion and politics, encouraging us to ask whether we should all try to be more like Alice.Trade Review'As Alice herself once said: "what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" This book provides plenty of the former while encouraging, I'm sure, much of the latter.' -- - - Antonino Tati, Cream Magazine, October 2020 'This playful and visually stunning tome investigates the Alice phenomenon and includes dreamy illustrations and quotes from a host of aficionados...' -- - - Australian Women's Weekly 'a rich accompanying coffee table book' -- - - Tianwei Zhang, WWD, May 19 2021 'full of riches' -- - - Claire Allfree, The Telegraph, 18th May 2021 'deserve[s] to be on anyone's bookshelf'-- - - Michael Glover, The Tablet, 15th September 2021Table of ContentsForeword, Tristram Hunt - Introduction, Kate Bailey and Simon Sladen - Wonderland, Kristjana S. Williams - Creating Alice, Annemarie Bilclough - Performing Alice, Simon Sladen - Reimagining Alice, Kate Bailey - Being Alice, Harriet Reed

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.Trade Review“Recchio’s book on Frances Hodgson Burnett is an excellent example of a popular woman writer reclaimed in the twenty-first century for her generically varied, financially successful and still relevant fiction. This book is a must for anyone interested in women’s writing, Victorian to modernist literary developments and First World War writing.” —Janine Hatter, Programme Manager, PGTS, Doctoral College, University of Hull, UKWith this literary reclamation of Burnett's novels, Thomas Recchio has made a significant contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies, persuasively arguing for the recognition of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a serious writer. One way in which The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett develops its in-depth analysis is by exploring intersecting threads of Burnett's life and career, thereby offering rich contexts in which to highlight her craft. - Ruth Y. Jenkins, The Lion and the Unicorn, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 213-215.Recchio offers detailed readings of most of Burnett’s fourteen adult novels (by his count), which he organizes into five roughly chronological clusters grouped by genre and topic. […] This book amply documents Burnett’s prolific work as a novelist for adults, her engagements with and influence on literary traditions in two countries and two centuries, and the rewards of reading her fiction more widely and critically —Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell; Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady; Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom; Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin; Bibliography; Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages. What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts. This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens.Trade Review[The] book is awash with fascinating and understudied examples of nineteenth-century medievalism, and is thus a valuable work of scholarly recovery and a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting read. -- PARERGON[An] interesting and very relevant contribution to any study of invented medievalisms. -- FOLKLORETable of ContentsIntroduction: Medievalizing Time 1. The Christian and Not-so-Christian Year 2. Medievalist Calendar Experiments 3. Christmas Becomes a Season 4. Winter Love: St. Agnes and St. Valentine 5. Rites of Spring: Imagining Origins 6. Summer Festivals: Religion in Performance 7. Fragmented Autumn: Harvest-Home to Lord Mayor's Show Epilogue: Christmas Ghosts

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works of Alexander Pushkin, collects the poems written by Pushkin at the time of his marriage to Natalia Goncharova right until his untimely death in a duel, and includes some of the greatest lyrical poems of his maturity, such as `In an Album', `Arab Imitation' and `Worldweariness', each presented in a verse translation opposite the original Russian text. Enriched with notes, pictures and an appendix on Pushkin's life and works, this will be essential reading for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the Russian bard's genius.Trade ReviewPushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps the only phenomenon of the Russian spirit. -- Nikolai Gogol

Read more less

Book SynopsisMikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known to Anglophone readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEmily Bronte tells the story of the ill-fated love of Catherine Earnshaw for the dark and brooding Heathcliff. It is the full text, with an introduction, notes on the author, Notes on characters, story outline and themes. The book also includes exam questions. It is ideal for students.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFamed as a wit and bon viveur, Oscar Wilde lived up to his reputation. This selection of plays, poems and prose writings, introduced by Terry Eagleton, includes "The Importance of Being Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Critic as an Artist", Apologia", "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism", "Letter to Robert Ross", "Requiescat" and "The Ballad of Reading Goal". Terry Eagleton is the author of "Criticism and Ideology", "Marxism and Literary Criticsm" and "Literary Theory: An Introduction".

Read more less

Book Synopsis'For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door And Leerie stops to light it, as he lights so many more...' The picture of a small boy peering from a window at dusk to watch the lamplighter in the street is one of the enduring images of 19th-century Edinburgh, and the child probably the most famous ever brought up there. Robert Louis Stevenson loved to conjure up a dashing, romantic lineage for himself, dreaming that he was descended from the colourful outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. The reality was less flamboyant but no less remarkable and he would learn that the street lamps of Edinburgh owed their brilliance to the scientific work of his own great-grandfather. This welcome addition to the Robert Louis Stevenson canon gives a concise account of his life - his family background, childhood and adolescence in a Calvinist, hard-working household in Scotland, his travels in three continents and his final years in the South Seas.It examines his relationships with his parents and his nurse, with English and American friends, particularly the family into which he married, and with the Samoan islanders among whom he died at the age of 44. Stevenson's childhood experiences and Scottish identity fed his fertile imagination wherever he found himself. His legacy includes travel writing, essays and poetry, and novels such as "Treasure Island", "Kidnapped", "The Master of Ballantrae", "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", "St Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston", still read and enjoyed more than one hundred years after his death. "Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind" is an insightful introduction to the life and work of one of the world's best-loved writers.Trade Review' ... it seems we still have to remind ourselves how wonderful a writer Stevenson was. Dunlop's new biography does the honours with appealing brevity and elegance.' The Scotsman A concise, well-written chronological narrative of Stevenson's life, which, though it makes no new contribution to our knowledge, tells the story well and offers convincing interpretations of key moments (quarrels with father and Henley, family relations on Samoa.' ... Professor Richard Drury, RLS website ' ... a stimulating text, particularly useful for young scholars and those interested in learning more about Stevenson. Dunlop's enthusiasm about her subject will certainly encourage readers to revisit Stevenson's writings and to investigate further into his life.' Journal of Stevenson StudiesTable of ContentsThe Engineer's ChildThe Cummy YearsThe Education of a WriterWork ExperienceIn Two WorldsNorth and SouthThe Pains of LoveR.L. Stevenson, AdvocateBeside the StoveThe Travelling MindFamiliesSkerryvoreBreaking CirclesIn the South SeasA Laird in SamoaThe Myth of Robert Louis StevensonPostscriptSelect BibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisGreat Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”.                                                                                   Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConrad finished Heart of Darkness on 9th February, 1899 and on publication it had an impact as powerful as any long short story, or short novel ever written – it is only 38,000 words. It quickly became, and has remained, Conrad’s most famous work and has been regarded by many in America, if not elsewhere, as his greatest work. Exciting and profound, lucid and bewildering, and written with an exuberance which sometimes seems at odds with its subject matter, it has influenced writers as diverse as T.S.Eliot, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It has also inspired, among others, Orson Welles, who made two radio versions the second of which, in 1945, depicted Kurtz as a forerunner of Adolf Hitler, and Francis Ford Coppola who turned it into the film Apocalypse Now. More critical attention has probably been paid to it, per word, than to any other modern prose work. It has also become a text about which, as the late Frank Kermode once complained, interpreters feel licensed to say absolutely anything. Why? What is it about Heart of Darkness that has captivated critics and readers for so long and caused so many millions of words to be written about it? And why has its peculiarly dark and intense vision of life so frequently been misunderstood? Graham Bradshaw provides the answers in this illuminating guide.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis“A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like,” the author famously proclaimed. In fact, in any league of likeability Miss Woodhouse is streets ahead of Miss Fanny – the ostentatiously “meek” heroine of Mansfield Park. Meek Emma is not. Indeed it is her sense of absolute sovereignty over her little world of Highbury – her right, as she presumes, to dispose of the marriage choices of those in her circle – which brings her to grief. And that grief, by the familiar course of the heroine’s moral education in Austen’s fiction, makes her, through remorse and repentance, a mature woman capable of forming correct judgements. Not least about whom Miss Woodhouse herself will marry.                                                                                Emma, of all the six great novels, is the one which conforms most closely to Austen’s famous formula that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”.  Emma is, by general agreement, the “quietest” of the novels.  Some have complained that there is not enough of a story in it, but others, as this guide shows, have found the plot in Emma the most successful Austen achieved. It is, for example, unusual among the sextet in playing a cunning trick on the reader who – unless they are sharp (sharper certainly than Miss Woodhouse) – may well be deluded as to which eligible young (or less than young) man the heroine will end up spending the rest of her life with. Or whether, given her frequently uttered distaste for marriage, she will end up the only unwed of the six heroines at the end of it all. 

Read more less

Book SynopsisJane Eyre, published on 16th October 1847, was an instant popular success. More than 150 years later, it still powerfully affects its readers with all the charge of a new-minted work. It is easy to forget, now, how shocking it was to its mid-19th century readers. Virtually every early reviewer felt obliged either to condemn or defend its impropriety. As Josie Billington reminds us in this compelling guide, the most savage reviews denounced the “coarseness” of language, the “unfeminine” laxity of moral tone, and the “dereliction of decorum” which made its hero cruel, brutal, yet attractively interesting, while permitting its plain, poor, single heroine to live under same roof as the man she loved. What caused most outrage, perhaps, was the demonstrable rebellious anger in the heroine’s “unregenerate and undisciplined spirit”, her being a passionate law unto herself. “Never was there a better hater. Every page burns with moral Jacobinism,” wrote an early critic. As the poet Matthew Arnold was to say of Brontë’s “disagreeable” final novel, Villette, “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage”. In this book Josie Billington looks at the passion and indeed rage which filled Bronte, and shows us that, though sometimes criticised for melodrama, this is a novel of great intellectual seriousness, moral integrity and depth of feeling. She quotes George Henry Lewis: “It is soul speaking to soul; it is an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe nineteenth century has been regarded as an era of decline for Scottish literature. This INTERNATIONAL COMPANION shows that it was instead a transformational period. Through a lively and extensive publishing community, widely varied Scottish writers found expression. New voices and genres flourished. Alongside cultural giants such as Scott and Stevenson, women, working-class, immigrant, and emigrant authors writing in English, Gaelic, and Scots propelled Scotland onto the international literary stage. From Shetland to Tasmania, from Celtic Twilight to science fiction, this volume explores the many modes of Scottish expression that emerged from this complex and fertile age.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDramatic Highland landscapes, heroic histories, tartan and bagpipes are among the defining images of Scotland for many people around the world. From the Romantic movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries to Queen Victoria’s Highland idyll at Balmoral, Wild and Majestic considers the origins of these ideas and explores how romantic interpretations of the cultural traditions of the Scottish Highlands and Islands became enduring symbols of wider Scottish identity. This book accompanied a landmark exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in 2019. It charts Scotland’s journey into the global imagination and invites you to think again about the meaning and relevance of ideas that continue to define Scotland today.Trade Review' … beautifully produced and magnificently illustrated … it is also a book that tells its story very well indeed.' Undiscovered ScotlandTable of ContentsRomantic visions of Scotland Symbols of Scotland Scotland after Culloden A romantic vision of Scotland Royal favour A tour of Scotland The Gothic revival The Highland idea Legacy Acknowledgements Further reading

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis illuminating book traces the development of Scottish women’s writing in English from its genesis in the late eighteenth century to its flowering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hindered initially by the hostility of the Presbyterian Church and the self-serving attitude of the male hierarchy which denied them a proper education, an astonishing number of women found opportunities, in the midst of domestic obligations, to write, and often publish – novels, poetry, diaries, journalism, letters, essays and reportage. Charlotte Waldie and Christina Keith visited, respectively, Waterloo and Flanders in the immediate aftermath of battle. Another intrepid writer, Emily Graves, wrote a memoir of her travels in Transylvania in The Light Beyond the Forest – from which Bram Stoker directly lifted the most blood-curdling elements of Dracula. Others remembered include literary multi-tasker and businesswoman Christian Isabel Johnstone; playwright Joanna Baillie; working-class poets Marion Bernstein and Janet Hamilton; novelist Susan Ferrier; memoirist Anne Grant of Laggan; and writer and scientist Mary Somerville, depicted on the cover, after whom Somerville College, Oxford is named. Trade Review'Any open-minded reader will learn a lot from this survey of Scottish women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.' Stuart Kelly in Scotland on SundayTable of ContentsBefore Fiction / Calvin’s Shadow / The Author of Marriage / Multitasking / A General Utility Woman / A Chelsea Interior / The Good Wife / Two Poets of the West / The Rainbow in the Cloud / The Highland Lady / The Immortal Joanna / Telling My Story / The Most Extraordinary Woman / Waterloo and Other Stories / Golden Lands / Turning the Century / My Own Country / Postscript

Read more less

Book SynopsisEverybody knows Charlotte Brontë. World-famous for her novel Jane Eyre, she’s a giant of literature and has been written about in reverential tones in scores of textbooks over the years. But what do we really know about Charlotte? 
As the famous siblings celebrate their bicentenaries, Charlotte Brontë Revisited looks at Charlotte through 21st-century eyes. Discover the real Charlotte: her private world of convention, rebellion and imagination, and how they shaped her life and writing – including the paranormal, nature, feminism and politics. It’s an indispensable guide for students and literature lovers, and emphatically shows why Charlotte is as relevant today as she ever was.Trade Review`Interweaves biography and reference to scholarly material with [Franklin’s] own take on pertinent aspects of Charlotte’s oeuvre ... [Her] witty tone makes the calibration of these two things — the pleasure of the literary enthusiastic and the scholarly — both easy and enjoyable. Franklin deftly mixes contemporary humour with reflectivity ... superbly written, exuberant.’
 Brontë Studies Journal

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat is a self? Greenblatt argues that the 16th century saw the awakening of modern self-consciousness, the ability to fashion an identity out of the culture and politics of one’s society. In a series of brilliant readings, Greenblatt shows how identity is constructed in the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and other Renaissance writers. A classic piece of literary criticism, and the origins of the New Historicist school of thought, Renaissance Self-Fashioning remains a critical and challenging text for readers of Renaissance literature.Table of ContentsWays in to the Text Who was Stephen Greenblatt? What does Renaissance Self-Fashioning Say? Why does Renaissance Self-Fashioning Matter? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited

Read more less

Book Synopsis‘The primary task of this book is to build a bridge to a deeper understanding of Schiller himself who, along with Goethe and Novalis, was one of the great spiritual forerunners and trailblazers of anthroposophy.’ – Sergei O. Prokofieff --- Planned as the second volume in a trilogy on Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and the Future of Freedom is much more than a conventional biography. Prokofieff shines new light on Schiller’s character and destiny, helping to establish his position as a crucial antecedent to Rudolf Steiner in the spiritual history of humanity. He also defines Schiller’s task in the context of the achievements of Goethe and Novalis at the end of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary period that saw a seminal transformation in the philosophical and artistic landscape. --- Following the recent publication of The Riddle of Dmitri – which explores Schiller’s unfinished drama Demetrius – Prokofieff returns here to the theme in the framework of Schiller’s life and extensive body of work. In timely fashion, he conveys Schiller’s mediating role between Central and Eastern Europe, indicating how he came ‘near to the soul of the Russian people through an idealism imbued with his entirely self-created moral power and his fiery enthusiasm for everything in the world that is true, beautiful and good’.Table of ContentsPreface – I. Schiller’s Spiritual Task between Goethe and Novalis – II. Friedrich Schiller and the Future of Freedom – 1. The Ideal of Freedom and Its Spiritual Origin – 2. The Battle for Human Freedom – 3. Schiller’s Premature Death and its Spiritual–Historical Consequences – III. Friedrich Schiller’s Demetrius Fragment as a Drama of the Human I – Addendum to Part III: On the Figure of Mikhail Romanov – In Place of an Epilogue: ‘Goethe’s Science according to Schiller’s Method’ – Appendix – 1. Examples for the Relationship between the Aesthetic Letters and The Philosophy of Freedom – 2. Schiller on the ‘Fall of Man’ and Freedom – 3. Evidence of Schiller’s Spiritual Character in his Own Work – Novalis on Friedrich Schiller – Rudolf Steiner: Excerpt from the Lecture of 18 December 1920 – Rudolf Steiner: ‘Friedrich Schiller’ – References and Notes – Bibliography of Works by Rudolf Steiner

Read more less

Book SynopsisA new series of activity books designed for avid readers who love the classics of literature. Devote page-after-page to engaging and stimulating mental and practical activities, for hours of leisurely entertainment retracing the events of your favourite novel and its beloved characters. Fun knowledge or aptitude tests; calligraphy exercises; paperwork; drawings to complete; multiple choice riddles; party games; puzzles and so much more. First editions in the Novel Escapades series include Pride and Prejudice and Sherlock Holmes ISBN 9788854420441. Bonus material includes specific insights into the themes, setting, and characters of each novel, as well as relevant cooking recipes that tie in with the plot.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel.”The novel depicts a heroine trapped in an abusive and adulterous marriage, and effectively dramatizes the extra-legal pressures which kept many such unhappy marriages out of the courts: fear of personal scandal, and of betraying one’s family through the publicity and expense of the process. Aurora’s bigamous marriage dramatizes the need for expeditious divorce without the enormous social cost, but the overt sexuality of the heroine shocked contemporary critics. “What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshy and unlovely record,” wrote Margaret Oliphant.Braddon’s text is studded with references to contemporary events (the Crimean War, the Divorce Act of 1857) and the text has been carefully annotated for modern readers in this edition, which also includes a range of documents designed to help set the text in context.Trade Review“This is the only modern edition to be based on the first three-volume version of Braddon’s much revised novel, and the editors make an excellent case for their choice. A substantial and lucidly written critical introduction situates the novel in its contemporary cultural contexts; in debates about realism and sensationalism, and anxieties about class, femininity, domesticity and marriage. The appendices, containing a selection of contemporary views of femininity and domesticity, and responses to Braddon and her novel, are an added bonus to this excellent volume.” — Lyn Pykett, University of Wales-Aberystwyth“Invaluable … provides copious explanatory notes, appendices containing contemporary reviews and writings on femininity, and a thorough, well-organized introduction.” — Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionA Note on the TextMary Elizabeth Braddon: A Brief ChronologyAurora FloydAppendix A: Victorian Femininity: The Stable, the Home, and the Fast Young Lady “Fast Young Ladies” (Punch) “Six Reasons Why Ladies Should Not Hunt” (The Field) “Muscular Education” (Temple Bar) John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens” (Sesame and Lilies) (1865) Appendix B: Reviews and Responses H.L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels” (Quarterly Review) “The Archbishop of York on Works of Fiction” (The Times) W. Fraser Rae, “Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon” (North British Review) Henry James, “Miss Braddon” (The Nation) Margaret Oliphant, “Novels” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) George Augustus Sala, “The Cant of Modern Criticism” (Belgravia) George Augustus Sala, “On the ‘Sensational’ in Literature and Art” (Belgravia) “Sensation Novels” (Punch) Select Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, in literature. A thoroughly unlikeable character, the Invisible Man is defined by his arrogance, impulsiveness, rudeness, and, at times, violence. He is, however, a man of great genius; but, his genius is selfish—no one profits from his experiments, not even himself. The Invisible Man is not only a commentary on imagination and the great spirit of invention that elevated the nineteenth century but also a warning against the eugenic and self-interested policies that threatened the twentieth.This edition includes a valuable collection of the nineteenth-century narratives of invisibility that inspired Wells’s novel, as well as excerpts of Wells’s nonfiction writings on education and class. Additional appendices situate the novel in its late-Victorian scientific and technological contexts, including material on radio waves and x-rays. Trade Review“This is a wonderful edition, setting Wells’s text in a number of rich contexts, especially the history of invisibility literature.” — Simon James, Durham University“A marvelously comprehensive edition of an H.G. Wells classic. Editors Nicole Lobdell and Nancee Reeves meticulously reconstruct The Invisible Man from early printed sources, providing readers with both a seamless narrative experience and a fascinating glimpse into Wells’s creative process. The carefully curated appendices provide rich literary and scientific context for this complex and sometimes troubling scientific romance, and the concluding filmography demonstrates The Invisible Man’s enduring appeal to the popular imagination. Highly recommended for scholars, artists, and students alike.” — Lisa Yaszek, Georgia Institute of Technology“From the striking X-ray ‘Self Portrait’ on the front cover to the eloquent blurbs on the back, the university classroom now has a portable, modestly priced edition of The Invisible Man worthy of Wells’s remarkable ‘grotesque romance.’” — Nicholas Ruddick, Science Fiction StudiesTable of Contents Appendix A: The Four Endings of The Invisible Man a) Pearson’s Weekly, August 1897 b) Pearson, First Edition, September 1897 c) Pearson, Second Edition, November 1897 d) Arnold, New York Edition, November 1897 Appendix B: Invisibility in Nineteenth-Century Fiction a) James Dalton. From The Invisible Gentleman. London: Edward Bull, 1833. I: 61-72. b) Fitz-James O’Brien. From “What Was It? A Mystery” Harper’s Magazine (March 1859): 504-9. c) W. S. Gilbert, “The Perils of Invisibility” (1869). More “Bab” Ballads: Much Sound and Little Sense. London: Routledge, 1872. 178-183. d) Edward Page Mitchell. From “The Crystal Man” The Sun (30 January 1881) e) Charles H. Hinton. From “Stella.” Stella and An Unfinished Communication: Studies of the Unseen. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1895. 55-56. f) Katherine Kip. From “My Invisible Friend” The Black Cat (February 1897): 9-21. Appendix C: Reviews of The Invisible Man a) From “Mr. Wells’s New Stories.” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (18 September 1897), lxxxiv. 322. b) Arnold Bennett. “The Invisible Man.” [Woman 405 (29 September 1897): 9] Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells: A Record of a Personal and Literary Friendship. Ed. Harris Wilson. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960. 258-59. c) Letter from H.G. Wells replying to Arnold Bennett (October 1897) d) Clement Shorter. From “The Invisible Man.” The Bookman [London] (October 1897): 19-20. e) Claudius Clear. From “The Fantastic Fiction; Or, ‘The Invisible Man.’” The Bookman [New York] 6 (November 1897): 250-51. f) “H.G. Wells’s ‘The Invisible Man.’” The New York Times (25 December 1897): BR15. Appendix D: Wells and Friends on The Invisible Man a) Extract from Letter, H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (Received 16 April 1896). b) Extract from Letter, H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (Undated). c) H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (2 May 1897). d) Joseph Conrad to H.G. Wells (4 December 1898). From Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Ed. G. Jean-Aubry. New York: Doubleday, 1927. 259-60. Appendix E: Biological Context a) J. Lockhart Gerson, from “On the ‘Invisible Blood Corpuscles’ of Norris.” Journal of Anatomy and Physiology: Normal and Pathological. Macmillan and Co.: London and Cambridge, 1882. b) From W. Robinson, “Notes on Some Albino Birds Presented to the U.S. National Museum, with Some Remarks on Albinism.” Proceedings of The United States National Museum, volume 11, issue 733, 1889. c) From H.G. Wells, “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science. Anti-Vivisection.” The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead. London: Ernest Benn, 1928. 222-227. Appendix F: Technology Contexts: Röntgen Rays and Radio Waves a) Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. From “On a New Kind of Rays” Trans. Arthur Stanton. Nature 53 (23 January 1896): 274-276. b) H.J.W. Dam. From “A Wizard of To-Day.” Pearson’s Magazine. 1 (April 1896): 413-19. c) George Griffith, “A Photograph of the Invisible” Pearson’s Magazine 1 (April 1896) 378-80. d) H.J.W. Dam “The New Telegraphy” The Strand Magazine 13 (March 1897): 273-80. Appendix G: Wells on Class and Society a) H.G. Wells. From Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. United Kingdom; Chapman and Hall, 1901: 229-30. b) H.G. Wells. From A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905. 265-70. c) H.G. Wells. From “Of the New Reign.” An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters. London: Cassel & Co, 1914. 28-32. d) H.G. Wells. From Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of A Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1934: 556.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence which has been unavailable to all previous writers.The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevenson's books, including Treasure Island', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and Kidnapped', have achieved world fame; others The Master of Ballantrae', A Child's Garden of Verses', Travels with a Donkey' remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those wTrade Review'Rich and colourful!Harman's book is a delight from beginning to end.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Excellent!RLS has never been portrayed with such diligence and care!her portraits of Stevenson's nearest and dearest are also unsurpassed.' Independent on Sunday 'Cool, ironic and often funny!appreciative, extremely subtle!lively accessible!compelling.' Financial Times 'A smoothly assembled and readable study which confirms Stevenson as a writer of the first importance.' Independent 'Vivid and engaging!Stevenson emerges from her pages as a vital, courageous, contrary and exhilarating figure.' TLS Praise for 'Fanny Burney': 'A great achievement.' Andrew Marr, Observer 'Excellent.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisOscar Wilde is best remembered for his longer works, his criticism and journalism, and his eventful life. But nothing distills his brilliance like his short fiction. Published here with facing-page annotations and an informative introduction by Nicholas Frankel, the stories pulse with Wilde’s trademark wit, sharp social critique, and tragic love.Trade ReviewA perfect selection of Oscar Wilde stories, with superb annotations by Nicholas Frankel, who is one of the most astute, perceptive, and knowledgeable writers on Wilde. -- Colm TóibínAlthough Oscar Wilde’s literary reputation rests mainly on his plays and essays, he was also the author of a passel of great short stories, ranging from the acerbic ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ to the delicate and heartbreaking ‘The Happy Prince,’ which brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. Edited with thoughtful precision by Nicholas Frankel and replete with beautiful illustrations, The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde will delight Wilde’s admirers. For those reading his work for the first time, it will prove revelatory. -- David LeavittNicholas Frankel’s Introduction and notes open up new contexts and rich complications that make this new edition of the short stories of Oscar Wilde essential reading—and indeed rereading. -- Kate Hext, University of ExeterThis carefully chosen selection brings together some of Oscar Wilde’s most beautiful and haunting stories. Frankel expertly relates Wilde’s tales to the author’s Irish heritage and to the lively scene of Victorian publishing, providing a fascinating account of the material history of the books and periodicals in which they first appeared. -- Stefano Evangelista, University of OxfordOscar Wilde’s stories continue to delight and challenge us today, just as they did his contemporaries. The pleasure of reading them is further enhanced by Nicholas Frankel’s informative and often fascinating annotations. This is a splendid volume. -- Stephen Arata, University of Virginia

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade Review"For Kathleen Raine, Blake was an eighteenth-century herald of a change in thinking that only now is coming to fruition. . . . Blake and Antiquity is the work of a scholar who serves the lovers of literature." * MANAS *

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisJane Austen has resonated with readers across generations like no other writer. More than two hundred years after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, people continue to honour dear Jane. In Performing Jane, Sarah Glosson explores this vibrant fandom, examining a long history of Austen fans engaging with her work.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the Choking Doberman, the Eaten Ticket, and the Vanishing Hitchhiker. But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from Beetle Eyes to the Shoplifter''s Dilemma and from Hands in the Muff to the Suicide Club. While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis Second Edition is based on the authoritative texts chosen by the editors from their scholarly edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with Dostoevsky presents a series of fictional conversations taking place between November 2018 and Spring 2019 in the narrator''s Glasgow apartment and elsewhere in the city. At the beginning of the conversations, the narrator has been reading Dostoevsky''s story A Gentle Spirit, which concludes with a dramatic statement of protest atheism. This statement suggests that love is not possible in a purely mechanical universe in which all living beings are condemned to death and ultimate extinction. The conversations spell out Dostoevsky''s response to this view and his advocacy of faith in God, Christ, and immortality. The themes discussed include suicide, truth and lies, guilt, determinism, literature, the Bible, Mary, Christ, Dostoevsky and film, ''the woman question'', nationalism, war, the Church, the Jewish question, immortality, and God. In addition to conversations between the narrator and Dostoevsky, we drop in on a dinner party at which Dostoevsky is discussed from

Read more less

Book Synopsis''You shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!'' First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O''Ferrall and her mesmeric mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of the time alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular for a number of years, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, and the trilby hat. The setting of the story reflects the author''s bohemian years as an art student in Paris; indeed James McNeill Whistler was to recognize himself in one of the early serialized instalments. George Du Maurier was a celebrated caricaturist for Punch magazine and his drawings for the novel form part of its appeal - this edition includes his most significant illustrations. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus Trade ReviewA captivating, strange and evocative story that brings to life 1850s bohemian Paris. * The Sunday Telegraph *

Read more less

Book SynopsisJohn Keats''s abiding poetic legacy is one of extraordinary and triumphant richness. Before the moment of `self-will'' when he declared his intention to be a poet, Keats (1795-1821) had chosen the medical profession. His apothecary''s training influenced his conception of poetry as an art that could mitigate the world''s suffering. Keats''s generous spirit triumphed over personal sadness, finding expression in his concept of life as a `vale of Soul-making'' rather than a vale of tears. He published only three volumes before his death at the age of 25, and, while many of his contemporaries quickly recognized his genius, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify him. This selection, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition of Keats''s major works, demonstrates the remarkable growth in maturity of his verse, from early poems such as `Imitation of Spenser'' and `Ode to Apollo'' to later work such as ''The Eve of St Agnes'', `Ode to a Nightingale'', and `To Autu

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exploration of the ideas, groupings and the social tensions that shaped the transformation of life caused by the changes of modernity in art, science, politics and philosophy

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJames''s correspondents included presidents and prime ministers, painters and great ladies, actresses and bishops, and the writers Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton. This fully-annotated selection from James''s eloquent correspondence allows the writer to reveal himself and the fascinating world in which he lived. The letters provide a rich and fascinating source for James'' views on his own works, on the literary craft, on sex, politics and friendship. Together they constitute, in Philip Horne''s own words, James'' ''real and best biography''.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTwain's account of travelling in Europe, A TRAMP ABROAD (1880), sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture, and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbits, and historical anecdotes in a consistently entertaining narrative. Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, A TRAMP ABROAD includes among its adventures a voyage by raft down the Neckar and an ascent of Mount Blanc by telescope, as well as the author's attempts to study art - a wholly imagined activity Twain 'authenticated' with his own wonderfully primitive pictures included in this volume.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series Trade Review“[A Tramp Abroad] is delicious, whether you open it at the sojourn in Heidelberg, or the voyage down the Neckar on a raft, or mountaineering in Switzerland, or the excursion beyond the Alps into Italy.” —William Dean Howells

Read more less

Book SynopsisEdward John Trelawny (1792-1881) was one of the most curious figures of the English Romantic Movement, and spent his long life travelling extensively as a naval officer, biographer and adventurer. After a brief education, Trelawny was assigned as a volunteer in the Royal Navy by the age of thirteen, and led an unaccomplished naval career until his resignation at nineteen. He met Shelley and Byron in Italy in 1822, where he became fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the two poets. His Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author, written after both their deaths, is the end-product of this strange obsession. An incorrigible romancer, Trelawny had three marriages - the second of which was to Tersitza, sister of the Greek warlord Odysseus Androutsos, whose cause he had joined and whose mountain fortress he looked after when Odysseus was arrested. He died after a fall at the age of eighty-eight, in England, and his ashes were buried in Rome in a plot adjacent to Shelley's grave.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017.   The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts,Trade Review“An extraordinary historical record.”—The New York Times Book Review“A rewarding history, and a reminder that the past is never a single narrative. It's a conversation with itself and with the present, well worth having.”—NPR

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin ClassicJoshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradTrade Review“You feel you’re meeting them on a human level. The book is slim and portable, as the best poetry books are (…) Bennett and McCarthy, in their introduction, set out their criteria for inclusion in ‘Minor Notes.’ They list things like ‘minimal appearance’ in anthologies and ‘very little, if anything, in the way of secondary literature focusing on their work.’ But it becomes plain that they chose these poets because they still speak across generations. This is a passion project.(…) This is a reclamation project that goes through you like a spear.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, both scholars of African American literature, aim to widen the canon of Black poetry by spotlighting poets who have been overlooked (…) giving readers an understanding of their unique voice and poetic concerns. (…) David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Anne Spencer, and other poets interrogate everything from labor politics to friendship in finely wrought lyrics that delight and surprise, prompting the reader to wonder how these geniuses could have been sidelined for so long.” —Poets & Writers“The first in a series recovering the out-of-print words of Black poets whose work shaped the 19th and 20th centuries, Minor Notes, Volume 1 draws a bright line between the creations of the past and those of today’s bards. Curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, while featuring a foreword from former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, the book centers clear, resonant voices—like that of Angelina Weld Grimké’s, who ruminates joyfully on the beauty of living in a Black body.”—Essence

Read more less

Book SynopsisOne of America''s most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson''s poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectiTable of ContentsEditor's Introduction: Emily Dickinson's Epistemic Ambitions for Poetry Chapter 1: Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing: Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson's Poetry, Rick Anthony Furtak Chapter 2: Interiority and Expression in Dickinson's Lyrics, Magdalena Ostas Chapter 3: How to Know Everything, Oren Izenberg Chapter 4: Form and Content in Emily Dickinson's Poetry, Antony Aumann Chapter 5: The Uses of Obstruction, David Hills Chapter 6: Dickinson and Pivoting Thought, Eileen John

Read more less

Book Synopsis''For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.''John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin''s incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin''s intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s ClassicsTrade Reviewa valuable addition to Ruskin studies ... Francis O'Gorman is a sensitive, intelligent and eloquent guide to Praeterita ... detailed and helpful endnotes. * The Companion *The editing and annotation are exemplary * Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement *Thanks to O'Gorman, the experience of reading Praeterita has achieved luminous transparency, and it is to be hoped that his new, very finely edited edition finds its way on to book shelves and into syllabuses ... O'Gorman's introduction deserves special praise ... The explanatory notes provide essential guidance and clarification, especially for the neophyte reader of Ruskin. * Carlyle Studies Annual *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of William Blake (1757-1827). The edition features a selection of Blake's poetry, illuminated poetry, and prose, and includes an Introduction, Chronology, and full commentary notes.Trade ReviewThe latest edition of Blakes selected works rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. * Wayne C. Ripley, An Illustrated Quarterly *Peter Otto's William Blake (Oxford, 2018) presents the latest edition of Blake's selected works. Part of the 21st-Centu-ry Oxford Authors series, the book runs over 800 pages, and is rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. The works are arranged chronologically rather than generically, even to the point of offering Songs of Innocence alone and again with Songs of Experience. * Wayne C. Ripley, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Chronology From Poetical Sketches (1783) [An Island in the Moon] (c.1785) From Annotations to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man (1788) All Religions Are One (1788) There Is No Natural Religion (1788) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1784; notes c.1789) Songs of Innocence (1789) The Book of Thel (1789) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788; notes c.1790) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Providence (1790; notes c.1790) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) From The Notebook (c.1791-93) Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) America a Prophecy (1793) To the Public [Prospectus] (1793) From The Notebook (c.1793) For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) Europe a Prophecy (1794) The First Book of Urizen (1794) The Song of Los (1795) The Book of Ahania (1795) The Book of Los (1795) From Vala or The Four Zoas (1797-c.1807) From The Notebook (c.1797-99) From Annotations to Watson's An Apology for the Bible (1797; notes 1798) From Annotations to Bacon's Essays (1798; notes c.1798) From Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798; notes c.1798-1809) Letters [1799-1800] From Annotations to Boyd's Translation of the Inferno (1785; notes c.1800) Letters [1802-3] Memorandum in Refutation of the . . . Complaint of John Scolfield (August 1803] Letters [1803-4] From The Notebook (c.1803-04) Milton a Poem (c.1804-1811) [The Pickering Manuscript] (c.1805-07) From The Notebook (c.1807-09) Blake's Exhibition (1809) From Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-c.1820) From [A Vision of the Last Judgment] (1810) From [A Public Address to the Chalcographic Society] (c.1810) Europe, Title page (late revisions, c.1815-20) From Annotations to Spurzheim's Observations (1817; notes c.1818) Letters [1818] The Everlasting Gospel (c.1818) For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820) Annotations to Berkeley's Siris (1744; notes c.1820) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Preface to The Excursion (1814; notes 1826) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Poems (1815; notes 1826) From Annotations to Thornton's The Lord's Prayer (1827) Letter [1827] On Homers Poetry and On Virgil (c.1820) The Ghost of Abel (1822) [Jehovah]& his two Sons Satan & Adam [The Laocoön] (c.1826-27) List of Abbreviations Notes Index of Titles and First Lines

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny''s dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century''s most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.Trade ReviewElizabeth Duquette has written an ambitious, monumental book that proposes a fundamental reframing of the nineteenth century as the long age of Napoleon. Dislodging "democracy" as the nation's mythic political basis and putting "tyranny" in its place, Duquette amasses a substantial archive of America's obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte to develop a thoroughly convincing account of the multiple tyrannies that stand at the foundation of US political culture-from the actual oppression of slavery to those purported incursions on the liberty of aggrieved elites that form the "tyrannical style" of nineteenth-century political discourse. * Jennifer Greiman, Wake Forest University *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Dispatches Introduction: Seeing Tyranny 1: Tyranny in America, or David Walker 2: The Tyrannical Style of American Politics 3: Raking Imperial Muck 4: The Bedazzler 5: Napoleonic Codes 6: Séjour's Spectacles 7: Young Men From the Provinces Coda: Napoleon Complex, or Mad About Napoleon Bibliography Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisCharles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world''s best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies. In this Very Short Introduction Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens''s corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens''s relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens''s multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term ''Dickensian'' today, and how Dickens''s enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. This book was previously published in hardback as Charles Dickens: An IntroductionTrade ReviewA fair, entertaining and careful chronicler of Dickens's life, and an illuminating and inspiring reader of his works. For those unfamiliar with his writing, Charles Dickens: An introduction offers the best brief guide now available. For those of us who know it well, it encourages us to return to Dickens with renewed enthusiasm and an enlarged heart. * Times Literary Supplement *Jenny Hartley [...] has achieved a miracle of compression in this charmingly packaged book ... the success of this pocket guide, however, lies in her clever selection of themes and emphases, and in her ability to relate all things Dickensian to the way we live now. * Michael Wheeler, Church Times Summer Books Supplement *Table of ContentsList of illustrations Note on editions used 1: More 2: Public and private 3: Character and plot 4: City laureate 5: Radical Dickens 6: Dickensian Timeline Further reading Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe most celebrated horror story ever written. The dreadful tale of Victor Frankenstein, a visionary young student of natural philosophy, who discovers the secret of life. In the grip of his obsession he constructs and animates a creature from dead body parts - with catastrophic results.Trade Reviewprobably the most brilliantly comprehensive introduction to Frankenstein that I have ever read. Even if you've read the book ... ou have to buy this finely produced OUP annotated edition to enjoy Nick Grooms distillation of Frankenstein's ideas and challenges: especially so as this is the first raw 1818 edition." * Magonia Review *wonderful * Oliver Tearle, Interesting Literature *a quality edition ... it uses the original 1818 text and ... it tells us so much about the author and her history; it is both a novel and a very useful reference book. And what is more, it both looks and feels good - well worthy of a place on your shelves. * Peter Tyers, Science Fact & Science Fiction Concatenation *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet''s creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet''s later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth''s long life--1770 to 1850--tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria''s Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth''s life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth''s poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.Trade ReviewThose who do not own the first edition should acquire this one...Essential. * T. Ware, Queen's University at Kingston, CHOICE *One of the many enjoyments of Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth: A Life is the quiet pride it communicates in a job well done. Wordsworth emerges from this comprehensive and absorbing study as a man whose sense of purpose and duty steadily grew from youth to old age. * Freya Johnston, The Guardian *[William Wordsworth: A Life] is judicious, fair-minded, panoptic. * Brad Leithauser, The Wall Street Journal *The richly revised second edition of Gill's biography (the first appeared in 1990), refuses the usual trajectory and instead celebrates 'a multifaceted, highly creative life of eighty years'. * Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books *A magnificent second edition, which displays the same qualities of quiet authority, tact and resistance to speculation, and thus merits consideration as a work in its own right. * Pamela Clemit, Times Literary Supplement *Reading Gill's work is a reminder of the pleasures and advantages of whole life biography. * Kathryn Hughes, New York Review of Books *Gill gives us the Wordsworth who bore life's tribulations as a philosopher, the Wordsworth renowned as a poet, but also the deeply human portrait of Wordsworth the man. * Chris Townsend, The Wordsworth Trust *Gill is the leading authority on the poet and writes in great detail about his life and work; an essential book for all students. * Robert Tanitch, The Mature Times *An essential companion to students of Wordsworth with much to offer the general reader. * Will Smith, Cumbria Life *This biography not only presents Wordsworth in the round, but also grants us a peep into his very soul. * Steve Craggs, Northern Echo *Stephen Gill's masterly and immensely readable "William Wordsworth: A Life". * Michael Dirda, The Washington Post *Review from previous edition The most scholarly and up-to-date book on Wordsworth... His judgement and interests are eminently sensible and show a full picture of Wordsworth. * Nikolai Tolstoy, Daily Mail *Impressive new Clarendon biography ...William Wordsworth: A Life is every inch the new definitive work. Gill has taken full account of Wordsworth studies in the past 30 years, blended the new materials with the old, and come out with a book that is scholarly, readable, likely to last. * Jonathan Wordsworth, Sunday Times *excellent biography of Wordsworth ... Gill is master of the very extensive primary and secondary sources, and a particular expert on the manuscripts, which the poet subjected to constant revision. * William Scammell, The Listener *not least among the virtues of this excellent biography is the way in which Stephen Gill balances the inner against the external man ... This is the kind of biography which any writer would be delighted to inspire, let alone deserve ... it is a measure of the significance of this biography that its seriousness matches that of Wordsworth itself. * Peter Ackroyd, The Times *all stolid good sense * Blake Morrison, The Bookseller *thorough, scholarly biography * Anthony Powell, Weekend Telegraph *Stephen Gill's new biography ... is enormously well-informed and avoids extravagant speculation, ... It provides an entertaining, shrewd, and manageably-sized narrative of Wordsworth's life * Peter Swaab, Sunday Telegraph *Stephen Gill's admirable biography ... it succeeds, where such biographies often fail, in transforming the life into the work by actively exploring, not avoiding, the complex problems that Wordsworth's self-account presents to his biographer. * London Review of Books *lively, painstaking book * Archie Hind, Glasgow Herald *Gill has already proved himself as an editor of Wordsworth's manuscripts and now turns that research to elegant profit. * Anthony Lane, Independent *It is difficult to see how a biography of Wordsworth could be enthralling, but Stephen Gill has made his so. This densely particularised and humane biography returns us anew to the poet's questions with an inwardness and sympathy few previous writers have displayed. * Isobel Armstrong, Southampton University, TES *the first comprehensive biography of Wordsworth since Mary Moorman's 30 years ago. * Blake Morrison, Observer *not many biographies are so admirably devoid of pretentiousness, silliness, and banality. * Chloe Chard, Weekend Financial Times *in Stephen Gill's monumental work, exacting, controlled, measured and profound, we have a moving portrait of a great poet the confirming of whose reputation has been substantially advanced by Gill's scholarship and judgment. * Bruce Arnold, Irish Independent *Gill is an immensely learned, scrupulous and judicious guide ... It is a mark of a good biography that the peripheral figures - the friends and acquaintances - are brought to life by a few swift, bold strokes ... A new biography of Wordsworth was certainly needed, and this one will be an indispensable companion for Lake Poet enthusiasts. Its insights are astute and its choice of quotation excellent; it could not have condensed more information into a single volume, yet it never becomes a mere procession of facts ... this volume is fluent and comprehensive. * Jonathan Bate, Country Life *a large, very readable study by Oxford scholar Stephen Gill who makes use of much fresh material. * Michael Field, The Star *thorough and scholarly biography ... Many books have been on Wordsworth, but this one takes a fresh look at contemporary records and the mass of material which has been unearthed since the last serious biography, a quarter-of-a-century ago. * John Hurst, Cumberland & Westmorland Herald *What Gill has done, very well, is to match the poetry to the poet's development. Gill, with his illuminating extracts, saves us from our own ignorance. * Anthony Hern, London Evening Standard *this biography clears new and central ground for future academic revaluations of the poet and his work ... It renders Wordsworth newly accessible and calls attention to his reciprocal relation to, and profound effects on, the national life. * New York Times Book Review *a lovingly told story * Christopher Hall, The Countryman *a thorough and detailed study of Wordsworth's life in relation to the poetry ... Gill is a thoughtful critic as well as a careful biographer ... sympathetic study. * J. B. Pick, The Scotsman *When dealing with politics or family matters Gill can be very shrewd, and especially so in his subtle account of the growing strains between Wordsworth and Coleridge after 1800. And on textual matters Gill writes with an authority well beyond that of any previous biographer. Many of his poetry discussions are first rate, sensitive and illuminating. * Norman Fruman, Times Literary Supplement *an eminently accessible as well as definitive study of the poet's life. * Sunday Times *not a general biography of the Great Lakes poet, nor is it merely a critique of his work ... It is an authoritative and readable study ... of Wordsworth's writing in an effort to lay bare the poet's life as a writer of poetry "full of human understanding and experience." ... a fascinating and enlightening study ... few will deny it's value in bringing the man and his work into fresh perspective. * Evelyn Holtzhausen, Cape Times *This isn't a critical book ... and discussion of the poetry is carefully fused with Wordsworth's self-discussion. ... this biography is good value ... Always well-written, it wears its substantial scholarship lightly * Simon Petch, Sydney Morning Herald *Stephen Gill ... has written what must now be the definitive biography ... a multitudinous life about which, even after reading this thorough and admirable biography we still wish we knew more. * David Parkin, Yorkshire Post *a model literary biography * Bernard Bergonzi, The Tablet *compendious new biography of William Wordsworth ... solidly constructed * Chicago Tribune *the biography is both scholarly and readable ... If William Wordsworth: A Life brings new readers to the poems or old readers back it will have succeeded admirably in its aim. * Peter Dyson, University of Toronto, The Globe and Mail *Gill has performed a remarkable act of revisionary scholarship by shifting the bulk of the story to the years at Rydal Mount ... this is a distinguished work of literary biography ... The biographer's wide-ranging knowledge of the period adds immensely to the success of this study. It will be many years before another biography of Wordsworth is required. * Jay Parini, USA Today *He offers a more factually meticulous version of the poet's early years to stand beside the mythopoeic self-presentation of the poetry. He understands the importance of Wordsworth's inner life. Gill's biography quietly but memorably reveals the drama of Wordsworth's life. * Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor *fine new biography ... Mr Gill's biography is up-to-date in its scholarship ... It neither sentimentalizes nor oversimplifies. * Richard Locke, Columbia University, Wall Street Journal *all stolid good sense * John Linklater, The Bookseller *this biography contains much to interest scholars * Henry Bartlett, The Courier-Mail *it is robust and intelligent on his marvellous body of poetry * Observer *Gill's narrative is well-paced and well-written. Gill's account is comprehensive and engaging, and skilful in its corporation of biographical detail. The Wordsworth specialist, as well as the general reader, will come away from it refreshed and inspired. * Charles Rzepka, Boston University, Essays in Criticism *eloquent and straight-forward retelling of Wordsworth's life * J.D. Gutteridge, Notes and Queries *triumphantly reconciles a vast amount of material to produce a life of Wordsworth that is sensitive to modern scholarship and faithful to the age in which the poet himself lived ... Stephen Gill has written a biography of Wordsworth for our times, and it will remain the standard life of the poet for many years to come. * Nicholas Roe, University of St Andrews, Review of English Studies, Vol. XLI, No. 164, Nov '90 *An assured blend of old and recently-researched material which combines fluently into a vibrant study of the poet. Mr Gill avoids wild speculation and brings us the essence of the man thankfully devoid of spurious conjecture. * Tony Firth, Yorkshire Post *a unique look at this Romantic poet * Windsor Star *Table of ContentsPart I: BEGININGS 1: 1770-1787 2: 1787-1792 3: 1793-1795 4: 1795-1797 5: 1797-1798 6: 1798-1799 Part II: MIDDLE YEARS 7: 1800-1802 8: 1803-1805 9: 1806-1810 10: 1810-1815 11: 1816-1820 Part III: LATER YEARS 12: 1820-1822 13: 1822-1832 14: 1833-1839 15: 1840-1850

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis Companion brings together a wealth of information about the perennially fascinating lives and writings of the Brontë sisters. In addition, wide-ranging articles enable the reader to see them in their literary and social context, and to trace their enduring influence on the work of other writers.Trade ReviewThe anniversary edition of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is a carefully compiled, extended reissue of the comprehensive volume of scholarship first published in 2003. Its timely publication contributes to the exciting increase in scholarship on the Brontë siblings to commemorate the bicentenaries of their births. * Tamara S. Wagner, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries of the Early Modern Era *Brontë scholars will be pleased to see Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith's magisterial The Oxford Companion to the Brontës: Anniversary edn., with A-Z entries for almost anything, as well as a chronology, maps and longer entries for broader topics. * Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *I have spent many happy hours dipping in and out and reading it over the last few months wondering where to start to extoll is virtues and joys This really is a glorious book, it is a treasure trove of information and a must have for all Bronte lovers. * Random Jottings *Wonderfully detailed * Christopher Hirst and Christina Patterson, Independent *This book is a must...A treasure trove of a book * Brian Maye, Irish Times *impressively academic and comprehensive * Times Literary Supplement *It's as authoritative as you'd expect, with more than 2,000 entries ... Even if you are not an academic seeking facts, you could browse absorbingly for hours. * Harry Mead, The Northern Echo *Table of ContentsForewordPrefaceEditors and ContributorsClassified Contents ListAbbreviationsChronologyMapsNote to the ReaderTHE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE BRONTËS: A-ZDialect and Obsolete WordsBibliography

Read more less