Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books
Harvard University Press Sinceritys Shadow
Book SynopsisEver since Wordsworth redefined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, poets in English have sought to represent a sincere self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures.Trade ReviewThe ambitious project undertaken by Deborah Forbes in Sincerity's Shadow is to reinvigorate sincerity as a critical concept...Overall...this is a wonderfully stimulating book, which should energize debate about poetic selfhood. * Year's Work in English Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Personal Universal Sincerity as Integrity in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Rich 2. Before and After Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Lowell, Rich, and Plath 3. Sincerity and the Staged Confession The Monologues of Browning, Eliot, Berryman, and Plath 4. The Drama of Breakdown and the Breakdown of Drama The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton 5. Agnostic Sincerity The Poet as Observer in the Work of Keats, Bishop, and Merrill Conclusion Notes Index
£64.56
Harvard University Press Emerson
Book SynopsisExamining the long shadow cast by Emerson, and his role and significance as a truly American institution, Buell conveys both the style and substance of Emerson’s accomplishment—in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world, and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher.Trade ReviewThis is a splendid book, an important one, and one that will have wide appeal. This will be an indispensable book on Emerson, putting the keys to that complex man and his work into the reader's hand. If you want to know why we are still reading and talking about Emerson, start here. -- Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.Lawrence Buell has made it his business to set forth exciting new lines of inquiry. He has done so once again: bringing Emerson up to date, moving him away from a nation-based paradigm, and firing him up as an entry point to a global, cross-lingual circuit. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of Empire for Liberty.This book is a literary-cultural event: the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics. One cannot call a work on Emerson definitive, even provisionally, but I cannot imagine that any Americanist - or for that matter, anyone interested in America, specialist or non-specialist -- will be able to do without this book in the foreseeable future. -- Sacvan Bercovitch, author of The American Jeremiad, and The Puritan Origins of the American Self.This a splendid book, an important one, and one that will have wide appeal. This will be an indispensable book on Emerson, putting the keys to that complex man and his work into the reader's hand. If you want to know why we are still reading and talking about Emerson, start here. -- Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the MindLawrence Buell has made it his business to set forth exciting new lines of inquiry. He has done so once again: bringing Emerson up to date, moving him away from a nation-based paradigm, and firing him up as an entry point to a global, cross-lingual circuit. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of Empire for LibertyThis book is a literary-cultural event: the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics. One cannot call a work on Emerson definite, even provisionally, but I cannot imagine that any Americanist--or, for that matter, anyone interested in America, specialist or nonspecialist--will be able to do without this book in the foreseeable future. -- Sacvan Bercovitch, author of The American Jeremaid and The Puritan Origins of the American SelfI learned from and greatly enjoyed reading Lawrence Buell's Emerson. -- Susan Sontag * Times Literary Supplement *Lawrence Buell has written a comprehensive, penetrating and timely study, the distillation of a lifetime's scholarship, of this great thinker and writer, 'the poet of ordinary days,' as his disciple, John Dewey, beautifully called him. -- John Banville * Irish Times *In this book Buell distills a lifetime of study and teaching on Emerson. Its tone is easy and confident, friendly and inviting, and Buell's aim is to share his admiration for America's first public intellectual with a new generation of readers. -- P. J. Ferlazzo * Choice *In this book Lawrence Buell shows us why Emerson remains worth reading in our own time...What Buell has to say here about Emerson is not only persuasive but also consistently interesting, surprisingly original...and, best of all, written in straightforward, lucid language...Buell's discussion of the relationship between Emerson and his prize pupil, Henry David Thoreau, is brilliant. -- Daniel W. Howe * Common-Place *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Abbreviations Used in This Book Introduction 1. The Making of a Public Intellectual 2. Emersonian Self-Reliance in Theory and Practice 3. Emersonian Poetics 4. Religious Radicalisms 5. Emerson as a Philosopher? 6. Social Thought and Reform: Emerson and Abolition 7. Emerson as Anti-Mentor Notes Acknowledgments Index
£25.16
Harvard University, Asia Center The Beauty and the Book Women and Fiction in
Book SynopsisThis study of Chinese women in the book trade begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early 19th century. Building on these studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber and the significance of this novel for women.
£35.66
Harvard University, Asia Center The Uses of Memory
Book SynopsisThe writer Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896) has been described as a consummate stylist of classical prose. Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyo’s imagination and argues that she reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period.
£30.56
Harvard University, Asia Center Practices of the Sentimental Imagination
Book SynopsisBy examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel.
£30.56
Harvard University Press The Writer of Modern Life
Book SynopsisIn these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850.Trade ReviewIn these essays, written in the 1930s, German critic Benjamin masterfully succeeds in changing our perception of French poet Charles Baudelaire as a late Romantic dreamer. Instead, he shows Baudelaire to be a thoroughly modern writer involved in a life-and-death struggle with that urban commodity, capitalism, which had begun to emerge in Paris in the 1850s. Benjamin portrays Baudelaire as a flaneur--a stroller who roamed the lonely Paris streets lost in the faceless crowd--as well as a lone modern hero searching for a means of selling his poetry. In the urban crowds, all traces of individuality are erased, and Baudelaire's famed "spleen" is actually disgust at that defining aspect of the modern condition. Indeed, in "The Painter of Modern Life," an essay Baudelaire wrote in 1863, he makes several acute observations about his sense of alienation that definitely establish him as a modern writer. Stimulating reading. -- Bob T. Ivey * Library Journal *Brilliant essays. -- Richard Wolin * The Nation *It's depressing to be a critic within a hundred years of Benjamin: he got there first on so many things. The poet Charles Baudelaire died twenty-five years before Benjamin was born, in 1892, but Benjamin writes about him as if they were there together in nineteen-twenties Berlin, making a ruckus. For Benjamin, Baudelaire represented 'the modern.' That doesn't mean that he claims Baudelaire wrote 'about' modernity but that his poetry embodies it. For example, Benjamin notes the influence on Baudelaire of new technologies such as photography, and writes that 'Baudelaire was his own impresario,' an artist who knew that his poems were commodities even before they were done. -- Sasha Frere-Jones * New Yorker *Now comes The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Princeton University professor Michael Jennings, and based on the writings of Walter Benjamin, a long dead German genius. Benjamin dissects the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) with a Marxist scalpel, among other unusual literary procedures. Why is all this happening? Maybe because in a unique way we fearful and confused souls recognize that Baudelaire's mordant and yet often exquisitely beautiful poetry and screwed-up life are a kind of mirror noir of our own teetering times. The same violent deaths, political treacheries, religious confrontations--and yet brief Roman candle bursts of loveliness are there. -- Leslie H. Whitten Jr. * Washington Times *This is an excellent collection of essays by one of the greatest critics of the first half of the 20th century about one of the greatest poets of the 19th century. In presenting Baudelaire in these landmark studies, Benjamin situates the first truly modern poet against the backdrop of the first truly modern city. From wide brushstrokes about the figure of the flaneur to close readings of specific poems, Benjamin's acumen makes clear that he was that rare breed of critic who could deftly weave the macro and the micro in seamless discussions. -- S. Whidden * Choice *This is an excellent collection of essays by one of the greatest critics of the first half of the 20th century about one of the greatest poets of the 19th century. In presenting Baudelaire in these landmark studies, Benjamin situates the first truly modern poet against the backdrop of the first truly modern city. From wide brushstrokes about the figure of the flaneur to close readings of specific poems, Benjamin's acumen makes clear that he was that rare breed of critic who could deftly weave the macro and the micro in seamless discussions...Jennings' supporting critical apparatus, complete with useful notes at every turn, frames these important texts in a way that reveals not only Benjamin and Baudelaire but also the intersections of modernity, poetry, history, urbanism, and many other fields. -- S. Whidden * Choice *Benjamin planned to write a book on Baudelaire, but it never materialized. With the exception of 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,' which appeared in a journal edited by Max Horkheimer and Adorno in 1939, his Baudelaire essays were published posthumously. In the past thirty years, some of them have surfaced in English translations, but all of them have now been retranslated and brought together in a single volume entitled The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, complete with a valuable introduction and notes by Michael W. Jennings. -- Eric Bulson * Times Literary Supplement *Benjamin's work continues to fascinate and delight because it has something for everyone: the literary critic, art historian, philosopher, urban theorist and architect. Whether he is talking about children's toys, Mickey Mouse, Surrealism, photography, or Kafka, Benjamin has a knack for figuring out what they can tell us about the wider world that produced them. -- Eric Bulson * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIntroduction, by Michael W. Jennings Baudelaire Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire Central Park On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Notes Index
£999.99
Harvard University Press Affecting Fictions
Book SynopsisThrailkill offers a new understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, positioning her argument against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics.Trade ReviewThis is a truly important project of reading realism through somatic experience, including sensation, aesthetics, and physiology. Thrailkill offers bold interpretations of the relations between corporality and realism. Working at the intersections of modernity, genre, and history, Thrailkill challenges us to incorporate "physiological thinking" into our theories of affect and reading realism's effects on the body. An impressive response to the explosion of work on sentimental and sensational fictions. -- Dale Bauer, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Thrailkill opens up fresh ways of thinking about our whole aesthetic experience—meaning our whole body-and-mind experience—by combining contemporary theories of emotion with surprising readings of literature and philosophy from a century ago. The book excitingly reorients our understanding American literary realism, and it uses this literature to advance our current discussions of the place of affect in writing and reading. -- Randall Knoper, author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of PerformanceTable of ContentsIntroduction: The "Affective Fallacy" Fallacy The Entanglements of Two Cultures Literature and Neurology, 1860-1910 Rethinking Emotion 1. "The Zest, the Tingle, the Excitement of Reality" Toward a New Conceptual Genealogy for American Literary Realism "Being Moved": Modernity, Evolution, and the Reflex Arc Laughter, Reflection, and Realization in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2. Statistical Pity: Elsie Venner and the Controversy over Childbed Fever The Case against Contagion Representing "Ontological Shadows" Holmes's "Algebra of Human Nature" Pathological Particularity in the Novel Coda: Anecdote and Abstraction 3. Fear and Epistemology: Tracking the Train of Feeling in A Mortal Antipathy From Physiognomy to Physiology Excess and Dissolution of the Nervous System Embodied Memory and the Pathogenic Secret The Forensic Self 4. Nervous Effort: Gilman, Crane, and the Psychophysical Pathologies of Everyday Life Freud, Feminist Reading, and Interrogative Criticism A Physiological Approach to Nervousness Effort, Agitation, Aesthetics Fracture and Fabrication: Crane's The Red Badge of Courage Coda: Reconstruction and "The Yellow Wallpaper" 5. "Mindless" Pleasure: Embodied Music in The Awakening and Theron Ware New Varieties of Religious Experience Theron Ware and the Ironic Rhythm of the Sick Soul Kate Chopin's Lyrical "Gospel of Relaxation" Music and the Sounding Board of the Body The Rhythm of Desire in The Awakening The Pleasures of "The Storm" 6. Corporeal Wonder: The Occult Entrancements of The Wings of the Dove Charming Milly From Trance to Transference--and Back Again William James and Mrs. Piper: The Medium Is the Message "Tremendous Rites of Nullification" Conclusion: Burning Issues Notes Acknowledgments Index
£51.81
Harvard University Press The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest
Book SynopsisThe Annotated Importance of Being Earnest provides facing-page commentary on Oscar Wilde’s greatest play. Editor Nicholas Frankel highlights the play’s relation to the author’s homosexuality and to the climate of sexual repression that led to Wilde’s imprisonment just months after the play’s London opening in 1895.Trade Review[This] edition admirably achieves its stated aim to enlarge the understanding and pleasure of readers and students of Wilde’s most perfect, most studied, and most frequently performed play. -- John Sloan * The Wildean *Frankel’s command of all the relevant materials—textual, literary-critical, historical, biographical—is impressive, and he puts that knowledge to splendid use in The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest. -- Stephen Arata, University of VirginiaAn excellent edition with new insights and superb annotations that continues Frankel’s lively and important work on Wilde. -- Linda Peterson, Yale University
£18.86
Harvard University Press Declaring His Genius
Book SynopsisArriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” But Wilde was, rarely for him, underselling himself. A chronicle of his sensational 11-month speaking tour of America, this book offers an indelible portrait of both Wilde and the Gilded Age.Trade ReviewOscar Wilde's year-long lecture-tour of America was a major cultural event—a Victorian precursor to the British Invasion of the 1960s. Wilde came like an apostle, preaching the gospel of Art, and he left an indelible mark on America, just as America did on the mind of Wilde himself. Morris's is a much-needed and highly enjoyable account, distinguished by wit and insight as much as by his singular command of rarely-told facts. -- Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored EditionMorris chronicles a year in the life of Irish dandy and belletrist Wilde, who, at age 27, was bent on invading America the way Dickens had a generation before… Wilde was a self-promoting genius, Morris writes, 'created, cultivated and commodified,' like celebrities today. He hadn't yet written his famous works or openly embraced gayness, but in his elaborate, precious outfits, sporting sunflowers and lilies, dropping affected bons mots for journalists to scoop up as he instructed American audiences with authority on 'The Beautiful' and 'The Artistic Character of the English Renaissance,' Wilde was challenging traditional notions of masculinity and also creating his celebrity… A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making. * Kirkus Reviews *[A] delightful account of the tour. -- Anthony Paletta * Daily Beast *When he arrived in New York in January 1882, Oscar Wilde is supposed to have told customs officials: 'I have nothing to declare except my genius.' Roy Morris's contention is that the then 27-year-old Wilde's American tour marked the beginning of the modern cult of celebrity. Wilde, Morris writes, made quite an impression on his American hosts, 'who were naturally predisposed to appreciate rugged individualism in even its most exotic forms.' * New Statesman *Declaring His Genius...is as entertaining a tour through Gilded Age America as Wilde's own journey must have been. -- Adam Kirsch * Barnes and Noble Review *[A] terrifically engaging biographical study...Though a rigorous historian, Morris is at heart a storyteller, and Declaring His Genius is so packed with 19th-century curiosities that it at time reads like an oral history by a contemporary of Twain's, if not by Twain himself. The book is full of digressions, creating a colorful tableau of American characters and their stories. -- Martin Riker * Wall Street Journal *A panorama of life on the road in the Gilded Age. -- Owen Richardson * Sydney Morning Herald *If we think of Wilde in America, it is of a preening show-off announcing at customs that 'I have nothing to declare but my genius'; and going on to epigrammatize his way across the continent. The valuable point made by Morris is that beneath the performance--and it was one, with Wilde conscientiously playing the mocker's role the public paid to see, and the public collecting its due of pleasurable annoyance--there was something deeper. Elaborate mask aside, Wilde possessed an eye that was both avid and innocent; and if there was much in America and Americans to criticize, there was much that surprised, instructed, and pleased him. -- Richard Eder * Boston Globe *[A] delightful romp. -- Fred Setterberg * San Francisco Chronicle *Morris tells the story with verve. It is difficult not to be amused by Wilde's encounter with the ebullient Leadville miners or the dour Jefferson Davis...It is delightful and in depth. Recommended both for those new to Wilde, and for his well-informed fans. -- David Azzolina * Library Journal *Enlightening and entertaining. -- Brooke Allen * New Criterion *Roy Morris Jr.'s exhaustive narrative chronicles everywhere [Wilde] went [in America], everyone he met and (almost) everything he ate. While this is very much a book for Wilde devotees, it still contains valuable insights into the media event that quickly became a blueprint for aspiring celebrities in all walks of life...Wilde may have been an incurable show-off, but Morris's blow-by-blow account shows that he was also an unusually kind man. He never used his wit to humiliate people, only to entertain them. Many Americans came along expecting to jeer at him and were quickly won over by his warm and robust personality...[The book] deserves credit for shedding new light on a period which many Wilde biographers have treated as a frivolous curtain-raiser before the main event. -- Andrew Lynch * Business Post *Roy Morris Jr. treats us to a lively account of Wilde's rollicking tour through post-Civil War America, fleshing out the varied impressions of contemporary newspaper reports with fascinating digressions on the cast of characters Wilde met along the way. -- Justin Beplate * Literary Review *Morris…paints a vivid portrait of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 tour of the U.S. His book is at once a scholarly and thoroughly researched text and an engaging--almost novelistic--narrative that academic researchers and the reading public alike can appreciate. It is replete with fascinating and amusing stories of Wilde’s encounters with Americans from all walks of life and social and economic classes; literature enthusiasts are likely to be particularly interested in tales of his meetings with the likes of Walt Whitman and Henry James. Stories of his ruffling feathers and winning admirers, challenging expectations and changing minds fill these pages of this captivating, must-read book. -- M. E. DiPaolo * Choice *
£20.66
Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies On the Wonders of Land and Sea
Book SynopsisOn the Wonders of Land and Sea is a comparative study of travel writers in the eastern Islamic world from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Situating texts in their socio-historical contexts, the essays study works by male and female Muslim and Parsi/Zoroastrian travelers in the Hijaz, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Europe.
£16.10
Harvard University Press On Modern Poetry
Book SynopsisGuido Mazzoni tells the story of poetry’s revolution in the modern age. The chief transformation was the rise of the lyric as it is now conceived: a genre in which a first-person speaker talks about itself. Mazzoni argues that modern poetry embodies the age of the individual and has wrought profound changes in the expectations of readers.Trade ReviewA valuable text…It is, at its core, a rich literature review circling what Mazzoni goes to great lengths to illustrate is the slipperiness of its subject. Modern poetry becomes no clearer after the author’s rigorous analysis, but as a continued step in the inscrutable analysis of poetry, On Modern Poetry offers a necessary and well-rehearsed step forward. -- Anthony DeGenaro * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *In this sweeping comparative study, Guido Mazzoni shows how poetry’s fate in the post-Romantic world reflects the individualism of modern Western society: atomized by small differences, narcissistic, ‘free.’ His sociological reading of modern poetry goes well beyond the conventional approach of matching poems and poets with local context. It discusses an entire corpus against the largest historical backdrop. Revelatory and often troubling, On Modern Poetry is criticism of the highest order. -- David Quint, author of Epic and EmpireRanging widely across European and American verse traditions, Guido Mazzoni maps the space of a modern poetry fundamentally determined by the Romantic revolution of self-expression. He shrewdly illuminates the ways in which modern poetry departs from earlier poetic conventions, shaped indelibly by the paradoxes of modern life. -- Jonathan Culler, author of Theory of the LyricThis is a book that many people will want to read, and a book that contemporary scholars should read. Tackling the uneven historical development of ‘Western’ ideas of lyric, On Modern Poetry is engaged in exactly the conversation those of us interested in the field of poetics need to have right now. I, for one, am grateful for Mazzoni’s many contributions. -- Virginia Jackson, author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric ReadingThis richly erudite book isn’t shy about its provocative thesis. Modern poetry, Mazzoni argues, diverges from both earlier poetic forms and the novel by virtue of its relentless drive toward subjectivism, autobiographism, and egocentrism. Charting the gaudy triumph of lyric individuation, he ranges impressively across two hundred years of canonical poetry in English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age
£31.46
Harvard University Press Emily Dickinson
Book SynopsisIn this inventive work on Emily Dickinson's poetry, Cristanne Miller traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style, finding them in sources as different as the New Testament and the daily patterns of women's speech. Dickinson writes as she does both because she is steeped in the great patriarchal texts of her culture, from the Bible and hymns to Herbert's poetry and Emerson's prose, and because she is conscious of writing as a woman in an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male. Miller observes that Dickinson's language deviates from normal construction along definable and consistent lines; consequently it lends itself to the categorical analysis of an interpretive grammar such as the one she has constructed in this book. In order to facilitate the reading of Dickinson's poems and to reveal the values and assumptions behind the poet's manipulations of language, Miller examines in this grammar how specific elements of the poet's style tend to function in various contexts. Because many, especially modernist, poets use some of the same techniques, the grammar throws light on the poetic syntax of other writers as well. In the course of her analysis, Miller draws not only on traditional historical and linguistic sources but also on current sociolinguistic studies of gender and speech and on feminist descriptions of women's writing. Dickinson's language, she concludes, could almost have been designed as a model for twentieth-century theories of what a women's language might be. As a critical examination of the relationship between linguistic style and literary identity in America's greatest woman poet, Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar provides a significant addition to feminist literary studies.Trade ReviewCristanne Miller’s study is…densely researched and…living and contemporary in its readings of the poems. Miller works from the assumption that Dickinson sees herself ‘oppositionally, defining her position in the world negatively, by distance from some social construct or law’. And Miller shows how those negations have a constructive role. -- Tom Paulin * London Review of Books *By returning us to fundamental issues of style, Miller focuses our attention on the relation between gender identity and literary creation… The accuracy of insight Miller brings to bear on Dickinson’s ‘cryptic revelations’ compels us to turn again to the poems to assess the revolutionary force of Dickinson’s gender-inflected, elliptic grammar of disguise. -- Joanne Feit Diehl * Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature *Miller is such an exciting reader… Close and thoughtful interpretation is combined with good humor throughout [the book]… [It] is readable and often delightful. Like Dickinson herself, Miller is quietly full of surprise… Cristanne Miller discovers Dickinson ‘in words (her own)’ (to use Adrienne Rich’s phrase); she sees a self-conscious, determined, decisive Emily Dickinson, not someone so stricken with grief or pain or even her own sensitivity that she doesn’t quite know what she’s doing or what she’s writing. Reminding us that Dickinson called her poems her ‘letter to the World,’ Miller views the poems as communicative, not solipsistic, acts. -- Martha Nell Smith * Women’s Review of Books *This grammar is neither too dry nor reductive nor abstract. Rather, it provides a way to organize Miller’s insights into the particular moments and larger implications of Dickinson’s art… Miller’s understanding of Dickinson as a woman poet is especially convincing, especially compelling… A fine book: satisfying and stimulating. -- Suzanne Juhasz * Legacy *Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar will be especially welcome… Miller’s study ultimately shows the linguistic canniness and aesthetic consciousness with which Emily Dickinson consistently distilled ‘amazing sense/From ordinary Meanings.’ -- Sandra M. Gilbert * American Literary Realism *Miller shows readers what is actually at stake in this idiosyncratic verse and maps better than anyone to date the links between the grammatical choices and literary identity. -- David Porter * Nineteenth-Century Literature *Reading this book makes one realize just how clumsy our approach to Dickinson’s poetry has always been. Rather than casting about for specific referents for Dickinson’s highly ambiguous references, Miller provides a method for understanding and appreciating the extraordinary suggestiveness of Dickinson’s work… This text should revise our approach to Dickinson, laying the groundwork for the meticulous examination of fundamental language use that her poems demand. * Choice *Table of ContentsLetters to the World A Grammar Texts of the Poems Compression Disjunction Repetition Syntax Speech Reading the Poems "He fumbles at your Soul" "This was a Poet--It Is That" "My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun" "To pile like Thunder to it's close" Names and Verbs: Influences on the Poets Language The Language of the Bible Seventeenth-Century Stylists The Hymns of Isaac Watts The American Plain Style Emerson's Theories of Language Noah Webster and Lexicography Nineteenth-Century Women Writers The Consent of Language and the Woman Poet Notes Index of First Lines Index
£31.46
Harvard University, Asia Center Plucking Chrysanthemums
Book SynopsisMatthew Fraleigh examines the life and works of Narushima Ryuhoku (18371884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. This is the first book-length study of Ryuhoku in a Western language and one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose composition in modern Japan.Trade ReviewJapan’s preeminent poet and social critic in the two decades leading up to the advent of the modern novel, Narushima Ryūhoku is today sadly relegated to the backwaters of literary history. Fraleigh’s beautifully written and precisely documented history of the writer’s turn from samurai to official ‘field’ journalist leads the reader to consider how literary discourses would come, albeit briefly, to inform the political and economic realities of late nineteenth-century Japan. Highly recommended for all students of classical and modern Asian culture. -- Robert Campbell, University of TokyoJust as Narushima Ryūhoku was one of the preeminent writers of his era in the realm of Sinitic Japanese literature (kanshibun), so has his biographer Matthew Fraleigh become a leader among the growing number of scholars working to revive this once vibrant literary space. Plucking Chrysanthemums and its companion work, New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West, at once compellingly elucidate kanshibun texts and vividly describe the culture in which they were created and received. -- H. Mack Horton, University of California, BerkeleyWith Matthew Fraleigh’s new book, a great oversight in the tale of Japan’s early road to modernity is now finally being remedied. His study demonstrates the importance of kanbun as a written language of nineteenth-century modernization and drives home the forgotten truth that, if we wish to grasp more fully the mindsets of Japanese caught in the transition toward the modern age, we must also read the vast output of Sinitic poetry and prose of the Meiji period. Narushima Ryūhoku is indeed an emblematic figure in this process. -- Ivo Smits, Leiden UniversityA work of enormous erudition that brings to readers in vivid detail the remarkable and varied life of this significant but often neglected figure of Japan’s late nineteenth century. Ryūhoku’s life, and Fraleigh’s recounting of that life, suggest the rich complexity of this period. -- Jonathan Zwicker * Monumenta Nipponica *
£46.71
Harvard University Press Poetry Manuscripts of Harvard Belknap Press
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsEditor's Introduction The Living Hand of Keats: An Essay on the Manuscripts, by Helen Vendler Facsimiles of the Holographs 1. On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies (fair copy) 2. Happy is England! I could be content (fair copy) 3. To My Brother George (pencil draft) 4. To My Brother George (flair copy) 5. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (draft or early fair copy) 6. To My Brothers (pencil draft) 1-8 7. To My Brothers (fair copy) 8. To My Brothers (fair copy) 9. Addressed to the Same [B. R. Haydon] (fair copy) 10. To G. A. W (fair copy) 11. I stood tip-toe upon a little hill (parts of the draft) 12. I stood tip-toe upon a little hill (fair copy) 13. Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition (draft) 14. On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt (fair copy) 15. To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crown'd (fair copy) 16. To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles (fair copy) 17. On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (fair copy) 18. God of the golden bow (draft) 19. On a Leander Which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend, Gave Me (draft) 20. O grant that like to Peter I (draft and revision) 21. Apollo to the Graces (draft?) 22. Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair (draft) 23. Lines on the Mermaid Tavern (fair copy) 24. To. J. R. (draft?) 25. Isabella (parts of the draft) 26. There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain (draft?) 27. Hush, hush, tread softly, hush, hush, my dear (draft?) 28. The Eve of St. Agnes (draft) 29. Song of Four Fairies (fair copy) 30. Shed no tear-O shed no tear (fair copy?) 31. Otho the Great (parts of the draft) 32. Lamia (parts of the draft) 33. Lamia (fair copy) 34. To Autumn (draft) 35. To Fanny (draft) 36. King Stephen (parts of the draft) 37. The Jealousies (parts of the draft) 38. This living hand, now warm and capable (draft) 39. Notes to the Manuscripts
£179.16
Harvard University, Asia Center The Chinese Political Novel
Book SynopsisFocusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the rise of the political novel to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s. Yeh explores in detail the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes, among them the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global.
£42.46
Harvard University Press The Passion of Emily Dickinson
Book SynopsisIn a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, deciphering their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day.Trade ReviewFarr...is one of the most intelligent and authoritative guides to this extraordinary American poet. -- Paul Delany * New York Times Book Review *Well-argued and eloquently written...Farr's study contributes essential cultural and historical contexts and offers superb readings of Dickinson's letters and lyrics. For these reasons, The Passion of Emily Dickinson enriches our understanding of one of the greatest and most enigmatic of American poets. -- Stephanie A. Tingley * American Literature *A richly revealing contribution...[with] eye-opening readings of' Dickinson's poems. -- Jane Donahue Eberwein * Belles Lettres *I admire [the book’s] even temperament… Farr admirably avoids ideological rigidity, even while acknowledging, and adopting, strengths of particular advocates. Her relating Dickinson to nineteenth-century American art is a major contribution. -- R. W. Franklin, editor of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum EditionFarr has opened new ground in our understanding of the poetry. I find entirely convincing her consideration of the relationships with Hudson River and Luminist painting in the period. -- John Wilmerding * Princeton University *Table of Contents*1. The Hidden Face *2. Solitary Mornings on the Sea *3. The Narrative of Sue *4. The Narrative of Master *5. A Vision of Forms *6. Art as Life * Abbreviations * Appendix: Poems for Sue and Poems for Master * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index of First Lines * Index
£25.16
Harvard University Press Representative Men
Book SynopsisAs Judith Shklar has pointed out, Emerson built Representative Men around the principle of ‘rotation,’ which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian America—the idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title.Table of ContentsHistorical Introduction Statement of Editorial Principles Textual Introduction REPRESENTATIVE MEN: SEVEN LECTURES 1. Uses of Great Men 2. Plato, or the Philosopher Plato: New Readings 3. Swedenborg, or the Mystic 4. Montaigne, or the Skeptic 5. Shakspeare, or the Poet 6. Napoleon, or the Man of the World 7. Goethe, or the Writer Notes Textual Apparatus Annex A: The Manuscript Appendix 1: The 1850 Compositors Appendix 2: Revisions in the Manuscript Annex B: Parallel Passages Index
£26.96
Harvard University Press Shelleys Major Verse
Book SynopsisShelley has long been viewed as a dreamer isolated from reality, a beautiful and ineffectual angel, in Arnold's words. In contrast, Sperry's book emphasizes the life forces originating in the poet's childhood that impelled and shaped his career, and reasserts Shelley's relevance to the social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary life.Trade ReviewTo trace the life force of his poetry and its transformation and efflorescence in the course of his development, Sperry has taken Shelley’s eight major poetic works—Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound Acts I–IV, The Cenci, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, and The Triumph of Love—and examined them chronologically within the context of the poet’s life. Supported by impeccable scholarship, Sperry’s incisive analyses illuminate for modern readers not only Shelley the poet but Shelley the man. -- Sharon Wong * Library Journal *One of the finest books on Shelley to appear in recent years. Its special strength lies in its elucidation of Shelley’s extreme idealism. Sperry finds in the major poetry life-values that are not only defensible but even prophetic for both individuals and societies. -- Donald H. ReimanTable of ContentsPreface 1. Our Proper Destiny: Queen Mab 2. Broodings in Solitude: Alastor 3. The Triumph of Love: The Revolt of Islam 4. The Human Situation: Prometheus Unbound, Act I 5. Hope and Necessity: Prometheus Unbound, Act II 6. The Transforming Harmony: Prometheus Unbound, Acts III and IV 7. Sad Reality: The Cenci 8. Romantic Irony: The Witch of Atlas 9. Love's Universe: Epipsychidion 10. Tragic Irony: The Triumph of Lift Notes Index
£63.71
Harvard University Press Inventing Edward Lear
Book SynopsisEdward Learthe father of nonsensewrote some of the best-loved poems in English. He was also admired as a naturalist, landscape painter, travel writer, and composer. Awkward but funny, absurdly sympathetic, Lear invented himself as a Victorian character. Sara Lodge offers a moving account of one of the era's most influential creative figures.Trade ReviewInventing Edward Lear is an exceptional, valuable, original study, presenting new materials on aspects of Lear’s life and work. -- Jenny Uglow, author of Mr. Lear and The Lunar MenSets the standard for future work. This is criticism that, far from smashing its subject into submission, brings Lear’s poetry, art and music to life, lighting up the imagination and inviting us to revisit the songs and limericks we think we know from childhood. -- Anna Barton * Times Literary Supplement *Deeply knowledgeable and sharply written…Lodge has not written a biography of Lear, though her book is full of biographical information. It is more a study in contexts, returning Lear to the local sources from which his apparently autonomous imaginative world originally gathered its strength…[A] rich and sympathetic book. -- Seamus Perry * Literary Review *This is a dazzling book, certainly the best study of Lear yet written. -- Richard Cronin, University of GlasgowBrilliantly original and deeply researched, Sara Lodge’s account of Lear’s tragicomic life and work will confirm his standing among the greatest of the Victorians. -- Dinah Birch, University of LiverpoolEdward Lear is one of those figures that everyone knows but few know much about. Lodge’s book represents a delightfully crisp and engaging introduction to Lear’s whole artistic career without losing sight of the humour and zest that keep him close to the hearts of adults and children alike. Never did nonsense make so much sense. -- Jon Mee, University of YorkSeeks to capture the multiple facets of Lear’s talent…The great achievement of Lodge’s richly illustrated and carefully researched and referenced work is to convey the reach and rigor of Lear’s ‘concrete and fastidious’ mind alongside his discomfiting combination of dazzling self-confidence and intense self-loathing. -- Ranti Williams * Standpoint *An elegant, well-considered romp. * Providence Journal *Lodge brings to this wide-ranging study of Edward Lear (1812–88) a combination of erudition and enthusiasm. * Choice *
£22.46
Harvard University Press Beginning at the End
Book SynopsisRobert Stilling shows how aestheticism’s decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing the failures of revolutionary nationalism and asserting cosmopolitanism in poetry and art. Breaking down the boundaries around decadent literature, he takes it outside Europe and emphasizes the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.Trade ReviewGives new and global life to decadence…This is a deeply learned and original work that shows the necessity of bringing modernist and postcolonial studies together. -- Citation for First Book Prize, Modernist Studies AssociationIn a series of brilliant readings, Robert Stilling offers a new understanding of anticolonial anglophone cultural production, one in which liberatory aims are best served, counterintuitively, not by the nationalist arts of social realism but rather by a cosmopolitan modernist poetics of decadence: arts and literatures that celebrate the aesthetic for its own sake. -- Citation for Honorable Mention, First Book Prize, Modern Language AssociationA dazzling confluence of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and postcolonial thought. -- Robert Volpicelli * Modernism/modernity *One of the joys of Beginning at the End is its provision of fresh and surprising perspectives on canonical figures of literary decadence by embedding their writing in the material contexts of colonialism and postcolonial criticism. -- Conor Linnie * Irish Studies Review *This book presents a highly timely contribution to our understanding of modernism, decadence, and postcolonial literary history. Ranging impressively over a global frame of reference, and joining the wrongly divorced sensibilities of modernism and decadence, Stilling shows how a modernist poetics of decadence may serve equally to record a process of decline in history and a register of critique of those developments. This is a major work of literary history. -- Vincent Sherry, Washington University in St. LouisStilling argues that late-nineteenth-century ‘decadent’ writing—its styles, governing tropes, and ways of imagining the past—have proven crucial to poets, playwrights, and visual artists whom we now call postcolonial. These are artists whose subjects include new nations, immigrants, people of color, the new global economy, and new international relations, and decadence has helped them to address these topics without illusions and after the failure of simplist or ill-fated realist or revolutionary programs. This is a book that scholars across the discipline are going to have to read. -- Stephanie Burt, Harvard UniversityRobert Stilling is at the forefront of a group of scholars exploring the powerful legacy of fin-de-siècle culture in twentieth-century art and literature. Beginning at the End convincingly demonstrates that decadent texts and imagery were central to the project of postcolonial writing, and carried a political charge that few others have noticed. It will figure in discussions of both decadence and global modernism for many years to come. -- Matthew Potolsky, University of Utah
£33.11
Harvard University Press Selling the Story
Book SynopsisEvery writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, showing how the business of literature affects even storytelling devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. In this new model of criticism, the text is a record of its author’s sales pitch.Trade ReviewThis is a remarkable, pathbreaking book. I found myself consistently challenged and engaged by its arguments. The book is most impressive in its suggestions as to how economic concerns are represented through strictly literary devices. Paine shows how works are shaped by their authors’ position in regard to literary value. He fascinatingly recasts what it means to read The Brothers Karamazov, and offers a genuinely new approach to Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Zola. -- Eric Naiman, University of California, BerkeleyPaine’s survey of these three novelists is masterful…As he depicts them, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola are neither puppets of an inexorable free market nor puppeteers of their readers’ false consciousness. Instead, Paine shows how economic concerns, as one guiding force among many, influenced their creative impulses, but did not—in naive Marxian fashion—overdetermine them…[A] considerable achievement. -- Marta Figlerowicz * Public Books *Jonathan Paine provides a breath of fresh air for nineteenth-century fiction studies, especially for studies of Dostoevsky. -- William Mills Todd III, Harvard UniversityScrupulously situates each text within its historical context and adroitly mobilizes pertinent histories of finance and business…effectively demonstrates the importance of social, cultural, and economic history for literary analysis. -- Erika Vause * Journal of Modern History *An interesting, well-written consideration of important relationships between authors and their public in the 19th century. * Choice *
£34.81
Princeton University Press The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental
Book SynopsisFor generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women''s sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women''s power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of true womanhood. She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women''s romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner'Trade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2000 "This book does an admirable job of assessing the cultural and libidinal values attached to sentimental fiction and its prevalent tropology of erotic domination in 19th century writing by women."--Virginia Quarterly Review "[A] complex, nuanced volume ...Though the author abundantly documents the oppressive aspects of fantasies of masochistic desire, she also traces the kinds of power and pleasure produced in works that eroticize female attraction to pain and submission to male domination."--Choice "Noble's flexible and dazzling close reading of Stowe, Warner, and Dickinson are artful, and she usefully demonstrates that exploring the variations of individualistic psychological response is key to understanding the work of sentimental discourse."--Rebecca Wanzo, American LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction "Weird Curves": Masochism and Feminism 3 One Masochistic Discourses of Womanhood 26 Two Sentimental Masochism 61 Tbe Parallel Structures of Sentimentalism and Masochism 62 "The Lineaments of the Divine Master" 85 Three "An Ecstasy of Apprehension": The Erotics, of Domination in The Wide, Wide World 94 The Making of a Masochist 96 Horsewhipping and the Exploration of Desire 113 Four The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom's Cabin 126 The Epistemology of Wounds 128 A Raging, Burning Storm of Feeling 136 Five The Revenge of Cato's Daughter: Emily Dickinson's Uses of Sentimental Masochism 147 The Power of Sentimental Masochism 157 The Erotics of Sentimental Masochism 164 The Presence of Sentimental Masochism 174 Conclusion The Possibility of Masochism 190 Notes 199 Works Cited 235 Index 251
£999.99
Princeton University Press Shifting the Blame
Book SynopsisDrawing on legal cases, legal debates, and fiction including works by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt, thsi book investigates changing notions of responsibility and agency in nineteenth-century America.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsCh. 1Introduction3Ch. 2A Clear Showing: The Problem of Fault in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers15Ch. 3Negligence before the Mast: Ship Collisions and the Nautical Literature of the Mid-Nineteenth Century35Ch. 4"Nobody to Blame": Steamboat Accidents and Responsibility in Twain65Ch. 5The Law of the Good Samaritan: Cross-Racial Rescue in Stephen Crane and Charles Chesnutt98Ch. 6Stop, Look, and Listen: The Signs and Signals of the Railroad Accident133Ch. 7Epilogue159Notes171Index193
£78.20
Princeton University Press Men in Wonderland
Book SynopsisFascination with little girls pervaded Victorian culture. For many, girls represented the true essence of childhood or bygone times of innocence; but for middle-class men, especially writers, the interest ran much deeper. This title explores the ways in which various nineteenth-century British male authors constructed girlhood.Trade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001 "What is new about Robson's argument is her contention that for many well-to-do men the image of perfect childhood, lost and desired, remained feminine... Understood this way, the idealisation of little girls in Victorian culture is an attempt to repossess the remembered self rather than a wish for sexual possession of the other."--Dinah Birch, London Review of Books "[An] illuminating study of the relationships that existed between little girls and a whole synod of Victorian middle-class men... What Robson detects in these men is less paedophilic desire and more a melancholy sense of something lost... Ruskin, Carroll, and their fellow enthusiasts, she contends, were chasing their own pasts."--Matthew Sweet, Independent on Sunday "This wide-ranging, penetrating investigation contributes significantly to the areas of childhood and gender studies, and 19th century British social history."--Library Journal "Robson skillfully interweaves the tales of these two seminal Victorian [Ruskin and Carroll] with discussion of child-labour legislation, painting, literature and conduct books."--Gill Gregory, Times Literary Supplement "An important addition... Well written, scrupulously researched."--Choice "[Victorians] certainly had a complicated relationship with sexuality and the young. This book can be recommended for throwing at least some new light on this troubled topic."--Nicholas Tucker, Times Higher Education Supplement "A provocative addition to ongoing debates about gender and subjectivity."--Christine Roth, Nineteenth Century Studies "An excellent book ... powerfully and persuasively written ... free of jargon, rich in its scholarship, and fully in touch with recent work in a burgeoning field. In all, it is a valuable addition to a growing list of books that help us see the Victorians and their world in fresher, richer ways."--Carole G. Silver, Nineteenth-Century LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER ONE Of Prisons and ngrown Girls: Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Constructions of the Lost Self of Childhood 16 CHAPTER TWO The Ideal Girl in Industrial England 46 CHAPTER THREE The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin's "Lost Jewels" 94 CHAPTER FOUR Lewis Carroll and the Little Girl: The Art of Self-Effacement 129 CHAPTER FIVE A "New 'Cry of the Children' ": Legislating Innocence in the 1880s 154 APPENDIX Lewis Carroll's Letter to the St. James's Gazette, July 22, 1885 195 Notes 199 Works Cited 231 Index 243
£31.50
Princeton University Press The Rise and Fall of Meter
Book SynopsisUncovering the unexplored archive in the history of poetics, the author shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2013 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, Robert Penn Warren Center and Western Kentucky University Co-Winner of the 2013 Sonia Rudikoff Prize, Northeast Victorian Studies Association Winner of the 2012 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association "[T]hrough her skillful close readings, Martin reveals a generation of war poets much more finely tuned to nationalist discourses of metre and their changing relationship to them than had been previously acknowledged."--Elizabeth Micakovic, Literature & History "Martin's great accomplishment, done with impressive detail, panache, and style, is to reveal the ideological presuppositions, political desires, and personal needs of metrical practitioners and theorists in the culture and period that she examines."--Richard Cureton, Review of English Studies "This book open[s] new horizons for historical poetics and prosody... Martin's [work] is at once the most historically capacious work to date and the one that goes the farthest toward proving not only the utility of a historically attuned prosody for the study of poetry but the necessity of the field to both formalism and cultural studies."--Ben Glaser, Modern Language QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Failure of Meter 1 Modern Instability 1 Metrical Communities 5 Meter as Culture 10 A Note on Historical Prosody 14 Chapter 1: The History of Meter 16 A Metrical History of England 16 A Grammatical History of England 33 Grammatical Instability 39 Metrical Instability 42 Chapter 2: The Stigma of Meter 48 Metrical Irrelevance 48 The British Empire of Letters 52 Marking Instress 54 Acute Stress in --The Wreck of the Deutschland-- 61 Mistrusting the Ear 67 Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter 79 Metrical Mastery 79 Inventing the Britannic 87 Dynamic Reading 91 Mastery for the Masses 94 The English Ear 99 A Prosodic Entity 102 Chapter 4: The Discipline of Meter 109 Patriotic Pedagogy 109 Matthew Arnold's Metrical Intimacy 112 Henry Newbolt's Cultural Metrics 122 Private Meters, Public Rhythms 130 The Sound of the Drum 139 Chapter 5: The Trauma of Meter 145 Wartime, Poetics 145 Sad Death for a Poet! 150 Therapeutic Measures 158 Bent-Double 171 The Kindred Points of Heaven and Home 176 Chapter 6: The Before- and Afterlife of Meter 181 Metrical Modernism 181 Make It Old: Robert Bridges and Obsolescence 187 Alice Meynell's "English Metres" 198 Toward a Critical Prosody 203 Notes 207 Works Cited 241 Index 261
£37.80
Princeton University Press Reaping Something New African American
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[F]ascinating and original... Hack's skill and sensitivity as a literary critic and the thoroughness of his research make Reaping Something New one of the most compelling works of trans-Atlantic literary scholarship to appear in recent years."--Joseph Rezek, Chronicle of Higher Education "As Hack observes, the relationship between Victorian literature and African American literature has been neglected, and this book fills that gap."--ChoiceTable of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction The African Americanization of Victorian Literature 1 1 Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance 23 2 (Re-) Racializing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" 45 3 Affiliating with George Eliot 76 4 Racial Mixing and Textual Remixing: Charles Chesnutt 102 5 Cultural Transmission and Transgression: Pauline Hopkins 135 6 The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois 176 Afterword After Du Bois 205 Notes 213 Bibliography 259 Index 273
£31.50
Princeton University Press The Political Poetess Victorian Femininity Race
Book SynopsisTrade Review"It will be required reading for advanced scholars of Anglo-American poetry and women's writing."--ChoiceTable of ContentsIntroduction: Slaves, Spheres, Poetess Poetics 1 Section 1 Racializing the Poetess: Haunting "Separate Spheres" 1 Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess 29 2 "Not Another 'Poetess' ": Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide 54 Section 2 Suspending Spheres: The Violent Structures of Patriotic Pacifism 3 Spheres, Suspending Disbelief: Hegel's Antigone, Craik's Crimea, Woolf's Three Guineas 83 4 Turning and Burning: Sentimental Criticism, Casabiancas, and the Click of the Cliche 116 Section 3 Transatlantic Occasions: Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Poetics at the Limits 5 Teaching Curses, Teaching Nations: Abolition Time and the Recoils of Antislavery Poetics 153 6 Harper's Hearts: "Home Is Never Natural or Safe" 180 Notes 213 Works Cited 283 Acknowledgments 313 Index 319
£40.50
Princeton University Press Good Form The Ethical Experience of the
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This book is itself very good at illuminating matters half-known, pointing out things about the Victorian novel that the reader might already have been aware of, but rendering them newly interesting... In an exhilarating series of conceptual connections, the brilliant final chapter on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda moves from exploring the development of statistics, to the psychology of gambling, to new close readings of Eliot's narrative complications..."--Kirsty Martin, Times Literary Supplement "At once familiar and original, brilliant and intuitive, Good Form ... will inform studies of narrative well beyond the temporal boundaries of the Victorian period."--Jonathan Farina, Wordsworth CircleTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Introduction "Moralised Fables" 1 1 What Feels Right: Ethics, Intuition, and the Experience of Narrative 10 2 The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About 42 3 Getting David Copperfield: Humor, Sensus Communis, and Moral Agreement 78 4 Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency 124 5 The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers: Daniel Deronda and the Counterintuitive 153 Afterword 191 Notes 197 Bibliography 235 Index 251
£40.50
Princeton University Press Victorian Pain
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Victorian Pain is a clear-eyed, beautifully written investigation of the role and uses of pain in the work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin and Thomas Hardy. . . . No one who is fortunate enough to read this book will look at the works it discusses in the same way again." * Times Literary Supplement *"Ablow explores the idea of pain in Victorian thought and literature, navigating between understanding pain as private, incommunicable, and pre-social (theorized most prominently in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, CH, Jan'86) and theories of pain as mediated by language and produced through social life." * Choice *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments ix Introduction Pain, Subjectivity, and the Social 1 1 John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain 24 2 Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain 48 3 Pain and Privacy in Villette 72 4 Charles Darwin's Affect Theory 93 5 Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots 114 Afterword The Fantasy of the Speaking Body 135 Notes 141 Works Cited 173 Index 187
£40.50
Princeton University Press Human Forms
Book SynopsisDuncan reorients readers' understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses--even as the two were separating into distinct domains.ains.Trade Review"Duncan’s study is a wide ranging, superbly researched and brilliantly written account of the ways in which the history of the novel is interwoven with the emergence of the new discourse of ‘natural'history, and its logic of an organic transformation of forms and kinds.’ . . . . Human Forms is a rich and brilliant examination of the complex dynamics between the history of scientific ideas and the development of the novel and, as such, will be invaluable to all those interested in Victorian fiction."---Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"[An] exhilarating study which follows in the footsteps of Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and George Levine in exploring the resonances between nineteenth-century literature and science."---David Womersley, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900"Duncan teases out, in intimate detail, the deep engagement between putatively Romantic and Victorian modes of thought and writing. This insight should give present studies of the novel renewed urgency. . . . Human Forms casts a bright light on the nineteenth-century novel not simply as an accessory to scientific thought, but as a powerful instrument for formulating questions about the status of the human as a social and biological problem"---Devin Griffiths, Modern Philology
£29.75
Princeton University Press SmackBam or The Art of Governing Men
Book SynopsisLaboulaye, one of 19th-century France's most prominent politicians and an instrumental figure in establishing the Statue of Liberty, was also a prolific writer of fairy tales. This volume brings together new translations of 16 of his most wry, political stories that continue to impart lessons today.Trade Review"Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men collects sixteen tales by Édouard Laboulaye, a French law professor and jurist of the Second Empire, and a strong supporter of the abolition of slavery and of women’s rights. Laboulaye’s creative work has been eclipsed by his political career, but in his day he was recognized as a writer of fiction, too, and especially known for his fairy-tales—with their satirical asides, irreverent humor, and free use of international sources, it is not hard to see why."---James Guida, New York Review of Books"The tales are delightful, and they offer a look at a little-known aspect of fairy tale history contemporary with the tale collectors and writers from the nineteenth century."---Sarah N Lawson, Journal of Folklore Research
£17.09
Princeton University Press Quaint Exquisite
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies Association""Quaint, Exquisite is a beautifully written book. . . . [Lavery] is an invigorating, compelling collaborative critical voice which demands, and amply repays, the reader’s time and thought."---Gail Marshall, Times Higher Education"[Lavery’s] musings are worlds away from the archival explorations and excavations preoccupying most Victorianists now. But both approaches, hands-on and theoretical, are valid and valuable . . . . Grace Lavery combines them, most eloquently when reading individual works. That is rather a rare skill."---Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement
£38.25
Princeton University Press Novel Relations
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Award, Northeast Victorian Studies Association""Winner of the Courage to Dream Book Prize, American Psychoanalytic Association""Christoff writes beautifully and passionately, and her interpretations are fascinating."---Jane O'Grady, Times Higher Education"A fascinating, deeply rewarding study, which helps us think afresh about how the Victorian novel alerts us to our most vital shared experiences."---Fraser Riddell, Victoriographies
£31.50
Princeton University Press Worlds Enough
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Spiced with citations of critics past and present, this cogent, necessary book is ideal for students in Victorian surveys because it both covers the field and stretches it out to the global and the decolonizing."---N. Birns, Choice Reviews"[A] provocative and important new book on Victorian fiction."---John O. Jordan, Dickens Quarterly"Written with her trademark combination of sharp-wittedness and bluntness, Elaine Freedgood’s short but ambitious book, Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, aims to show that the prevailing understandingof the Victorian novel’s realism is fundamentally wrong and, more important, pernicious in its effects. . . . Elaine Freedgood is an iconoclastic, inventive critic whose work is suffused with moral and political urgency."---Daniel Hack, Modern Philology"What this book is especially good on is the experience of process in the reading of the [Victorian] novel."---Philip Davis, Review of English Studies"Rigorously theoretical, enlivened with an eye for quirks of material, social, and textual meaning, and full of keen perceptions about a wide range of novels. A luminous provocation, it will spark much discussion and debate."---John Kucich, Victorian Studies
£28.50
Princeton University Press Good Form
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel is a major contribution to the study of ethics in realist fiction. Grounded in a masterful command of philosophy and literary theory, and argued through careful readings of Victorian novels, it sheds considerable light on a central topic in fiction studies. It will be vigorously discussed and greatly valued in Victorian studies and narrative studies generally."---John Kucich, Victorian Studies"This book is itself very good at illuminating matters half-known, pointing out things about the Victorian novel that the reader might already have been aware of, but rendering them newly interesting. . . . In an exhilarating series of conceptual connections, the brilliant final chapter on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda moves from exploring the development of statistics, to the psychology of gambling, to new close readings of Eliot’s narrative complications. . . ."---Kirsty Martin, Times Literary Supplement"At once familiar and original, brilliant and intuitive, Good Form . . . will inform studies of narrative well beyond the temporal boundaries of the Victorian period."---Jonathan Farina, Wordsworth Circle"This thoughtful study adds an interesting set of coordinates by which to map Victorian novels as a genre. It recovers a branch of Victorian moral philosophy that has languished under the critique (or neglect) of modernism and post-structuralism and supplies a methodology for examining with fresh theoretical sophistication the very 'readerliness' of those texts that fall on the wrong side of Roland Barthes's 'writerly/readerly' dichotomy. Such reconsideration is over-due, and Rosenthal presents it with admirable erudition."---Sarah Gates, Dickens Quarterly"Each of the body chapters is rich with rewards of its own. . . . If scholarship consists, as Rosenthal proposes, of an ongoing temporally extended conversation with ‘ourselves,' I was left with no doubt that Rosenthal was one of the selves with whom I would want to speak."---John Plotz, Nineteenth Century Literature"Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel provides a meticulously researched and original approach to both Victorian literature and novel theory, all the more impressive given that this is the author’s first book. . . . A compelling work of scholarship, one that is sure to be of use to scholars of Victorian literature and culture and novel theory alike."---Isabella Cooper, Studies in the Novel"Rosenthal enlivens our sense of the possibilities and powers of narrative by arguing that the temporal unfolding of a novel is a moral, philosophical, and ethical matter."---Katherine Voyles, Victorian Review"Brilliant. . . . [Good Form] is a formidably inventive, urbane, and compelling work of scholarship that marshals historical and philosophical insight alongside deft close analysis to reimagine key tenets of novel theory."---Daniel Williams, MLN"A major contribution to the study of ethics in realist fiction. Grounded in a masterful command of philosophy and literary theory, and argued through careful readings of Victorian novels, [Good Form] sheds considerable light on a central topic in fiction studies. It will be vigorously discussed and greatly valued in Victorian studies and narrative studies generally."---John Kucich, Victorian Studies"A most inspiring and insightful book where he brings up the interconnectedness between moral intuition and the form of the novel—the nineteenth century Victorian novel, to be more specific; but with implications for contemporary literature as well."---Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
£27.00
Princeton University Press The Political Poetess
Book SynopsisTrade Review"It will be required reading for advanced scholars of Anglo-American poetry and women's writing." * Choice *"Intellectual vibrant [and] important. . . . A politically committed, intellectually generous, and abundantly useful book."---Julia Hansen, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature"An unforgettable account of female poets as blazingly politically involved. Lootens turns the Poetess on her head in The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. No longer a pale, lovely, swooning maiden, Lootens’s Poetess is a person of color, a person deeply imbricated in transatlantic antislavery rhetoric, a woman who speaks for a nation. In bravura rereadings of well-known poems (and some not known at all), Lootens makes us see anew by interrogating 'how national sentimentality thinks.'"---Talia Schaffer, Studies in English Literature"Lootens marshals a considerable number of cultural sources, literary and not, to build a thorough case for her reexamination of the connections between racial and separate spheres ideology. . . . At its ambitious best, The Political Poetess suspends the boundaries that continue to haunt our current critical lives: between black and white, public and private, British and American, past and present."---Amanda Adams, Victorian Periodicals Review"In all these ways, the Political Poetess becomes integral to the revisionist history of the female literary tradition emphasising national anxieties. . . . [Lootens] reads with acumen and diligently researches the historical circumstances of poetic production."---Georgia Gotsi, Historical Review
£27.00
Princeton University Press Jane Austen Early and Late
Book SynopsisTrade Review"An A Kennedy Smith Book of the Year""Fans of Jane Austen will enjoy Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late, which examines some of the teenage writings from the author of Pride and Prejudice, many of which were, surprisingly, full of ‘gallows humour.’"---Martin Chilton, Independent"If you know your Austen, this book is a dream."---Norma Clarke, Literary Review"Austenites will appreciate the historical context Johnston provides. . . . Students and devotees of Austen will appreciate the light shed on a lesser-known part of her career." * Publishers Weekly *"A wonderfully expansive reimagining of the corpus. . . . The great achievement of Johnston’s book is putting us face-to-face with the writing itself: with the sheer compositional energy of Austen’s work."---Alex Woloch, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"In a stream of perceptive and engaging close readings of Austen’s writing, the book insists on stylistic, thematic and conceptual connections not only between her juvenilia and published novels, but among all the author’s written output. . . . Johnston also weaves into her analysis a stunning array of works that likely constituted Austen’s own reading."---Michelle Levy, Review of English Studies
£29.75
Princeton University Press Communities of Care
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize""Honorable Mention for North American Victorian Studies Association Best Book Award""It is not often that a literary critic working in a historical period writes such a timely book. . . . Schaffer shows in a practical way how we can use our skills as literary scholars to effect the kinds of changes in academic life that we want to see."---Rachael Scarborough King, Los Angeles Review of Books"A groundbreaking work. . . . Schaffer’s explanation of reparative reading and discussion of what care ethics means to readers and thinkers in the present gives this study relevance beyond Victorian studies." * Choice Reviews *"Schaffer’s attunement to a historically-informed understanding of Victorian caring allows her to recalibrate our understanding of novels we thought we knew well. . . . Communities of Care is truly a book that brings Victorian studies into alignment with some of the pressing issues of our time."---Adela Pinch, Victorian Studies"A rare academic book that provides a fresh approach to Victorian literature. . . . [Communities of Care is] capacious, smart, and engaging."---Catherine J. Golden, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
£37.80
Princeton University Press What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the 2018 Scottish Research Book of the Year, Saltire Society""Received the Judges’ Commendation for the 2018 SHARP DeLong Book History Book Prize, The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing""Winner of the 2018 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, Media Ecology Association""A broad study of material reimaginings of the Romantics, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism not only highlights the interconnected nature of these various objects in reception history—even as the narratives they build are contradictory—but also legitimizes them as spaces for further literary study."---Megan Peiser, Victorian Periodicals Review"What the Victorians Made of Romanticism is a major achievement."---Richard Cronin, BARS Review"What the Victorians Made of Romanticism offers valuable, always fascinating, insights into cultural history."---George P. Landow, Victorian Web"Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism extends the catalogue of recent studies that take seriously the mobility of Romantic writing across generations."---Paul Westover, Studies in Romantacism"Fascinating, erudite, and imaginative . . . this monograph is a rich new reception history for an interdisciplinary age."---Natalie Reeve, Wilkie Collins Journal
£27.00
Princeton University Press Quaint Exquisite
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the NAVSA Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies Association""Quaint, Exquisite is a beautifully written book. . . . [Lavery] is an invigorating, compelling collaborative critical voice which demands, and amply repays, the reader’s time and thought."---Gail Marshall, Times Higher Education"[Lavery’s] musings are worlds away from the archival explorations and excavations preoccupying most Victorianists now. But both approaches, hands-on and theoretical, are valid and valuable . . . . Grace Lavery combines them, most eloquently when reading individual works. That is rather a rare skill."---Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement
£999.99
Princeton University Press Worlds Enough
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Spiced with citations of critics past and present, this cogent, necessary book is ideal for students in Victorian surveys because it both covers the field and stretches it out to the global and the decolonizing."---N. Birns, Choice Reviews"[A] provocative and important new book on Victorian fiction."---John O. Jordan, Dickens Quarterly"Written with her trademark combination of sharp-wittedness and bluntness, Elaine Freedgood’s short but ambitious book, Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, aims to show that the prevailing understandingof the Victorian novel’s realism is fundamentally wrong and, more important, pernicious in its effects. . . . Elaine Freedgood is an iconoclastic, inventive critic whose work is suffused with moral and political urgency."---Daniel Hack, Modern Philology"What this book is especially good on is the experience of process in the reading of the [Victorian] novel."---Philip Davis, Review of English Studies"Rigorously theoretical, enlivened with an eye for quirks of material, social, and textual meaning, and full of keen perceptions about a wide range of novels. A luminous provocation, it will spark much discussion and debate."---John Kucich, Victorian Studies
£20.90
Princeton University Press Jane Austen Early and Late
Book SynopsisTrade Review"An A Kennedy Smith Book of the Year""Fans of Jane Austen will enjoy Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late, which examines some of the teenage writings from the author of Pride and Prejudice, many of which were, surprisingly, full of ‘gallows humour.’"---Martin Chilton, Independent"If you know your Austen, this book is a dream."---Norma Clarke, Literary Review"Austenites will appreciate the historical context Johnston provides. . . . Students and devotees of Austen will appreciate the light shed on a lesser-known part of her career." * Publishers Weekly *"A wonderfully expansive reimagining of the corpus. . . . The great achievement of Johnston’s book is putting us face-to-face with the writing itself: with the sheer compositional energy of Austen’s work."---Alex Woloch, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"In a stream of perceptive and engaging close readings of Austen’s writing, the book insists on stylistic, thematic and conceptual connections not only between her juvenilia and published novels, but among all the author’s written output. . . . Johnston also weaves into her analysis a stunning array of works that likely constituted Austen’s own reading."---Michelle Levy, Review of English Studies"The delicate but strong web of argument which is spun in this book, by an author who has read everything written by Austen’s contemporaries and everything written about her, will delight the scholar. General readers who are willing to follow the book’s intricacies will also be rewarded with a range of fascinating insights into a writer whose œuvre has become almost too familiar, so great is her popular appeal."---Michael Wheeler, Church Times
£18.00
Princeton University Press Novel Relations
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Award, Northeast Victorian Studies Association""Winner of the Courage to Dream Book Prize, American Psychoanalytic Association""Christoff writes beautifully and passionately, and her interpretations are fascinating."---Jane O'Grady, Times Higher Education"A fascinating, deeply rewarding study, which helps us think afresh about how the Victorian novel alerts us to our most vital shared experiences."---Fraser Riddell, Victoriographies
£23.75
Princeton University Press American Insecurity and the Origins of
Book Synopsis
£27.00
Princeton University Press The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume 4
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Princeton University Press Esthetics as Nightmare Russian Literary Theory
Book SynopsisAs an epoch of "censorship terror" drew to a close with the death of Nicholas I and the end of the Crimean War, Russian intellectuals had begun expressing their desires for political, philosophical, and religious reform through passionate debates over literature and esthetics. Charles Moser re-creates the leading controversies over literature and aTable of Contents*FrontMatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. ix*Illustrations, pg. xi*Preface, pg. xiii*A Note on the References, pg. xxiii*Chapter One. The Disputants and Their Journals, pg. 3*Chapter Two. Art and Rationality, pg. 87*Chapter Three. Art and Morality, pg. 150*Chapter Four. Aft and Reality, pg. 218*Bibliography, pg. 271*Index, pg. 281
£40.50
Princeton University Press Rural Scenes and National Representation
Book SynopsisElizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, EmilyTrade Review"Helsinger's discussions of images and texts offer new and important insights into the political and cultural uses of the countryside, and they will essential reading for anyone interested in that history of this period. While it is impossible to do justice to the scope, interest, and nuance of her arguments, this review must suffice to say that this is the kind of book students of British landscape painting and literature will turn to again and again with pleasure and profit."--AlbionTable of ContentsLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi INTRODUCTION Land and the Nation 3 PART I: ICONS AND AUDIENCES CHAPTER ONE Constable: The Making of a National Painter 41 CHAPTER TWO Out of the Heart of the Country: Tennyson's English Idyls 65 PART II: CONTESTED GROUND CHAPTER THREE Cobbett's Radical Husbandry 103 CHAPTER FOUR Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet 141 CHAPTER FIVE Turner's England and Wales 162 CHAPTER SIX Bronte's Ghosts 175 RETROSPECT Eliot's Risky History 217 NOTES 239 INDEX 283
£40.50
Princeton University Press The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Honorable Mention for the 2001 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Multivolume Reference: Humanities, Association of American Publishers"
£999.99
