Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

Book SynopsisClaudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworth's revolutionary understanding of real language, Brodsky unfolds a provocative new theory of poetry, a way of looking at poetry that challenges traditional assumptions. Analyzing both theory and practice, and taking in a broad swathe of writers and thinkers from Wordsworth to Rousseau to Hegel to Proust, Brodsky is at pains to draw out the transformative, active, and effective power of literature. Poetry, she says, is only worthy of the name when it is not the property of the poet but of society, when it is valued for what it does. Words'' Worth is a bold new work, by a leading scholar of literature, which demands a response from all students and scholars of modern poetry.Trade ReviewIn this compelling study, Claudia Brodsky radically revises our understanding of what the poet does, above all by developing dazzling readings of what Wordsworth meant by such central terms as real language, imagination, and nature. Through Brodsky’s tenacious, fine-grained readings of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics – and also through her perceptive discussions of other writers from Diderot to De Man – language emerges as uniquely active and as capable of producing a distinctive kind of knowledge that goes beyond the merely empirical. This is a revelatory book that will transform our sense of the capacities of poetry for good. * Ross Wilson, University Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge, UK, and author of Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (2013) *'Word's worth' or the 'worthy purpose' of language, and in particular what Wordsworth called alternately 'the real language of men' and 'the language really spoken by men,' is the subject of Claudia Brodsky's illuminating book. In a series of suggestive readings of Wordsworth's poetry and prose Brodsky discovers a force of this real and really spoken language that is analogous to the transcendental power to think what cannot be known in the cognitive sense--what Kant called the sublime. * Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and George Hazard Crooker Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA, and author of Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (2014) *In Words' Worth, Claudia Brodsky accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an original reading of Wordsworth that renders his potent commonplaces strange, much in the manner of the poet himself. Rigorously lucid and seriously playful, engaging a range of interlocutors from Kant to Rousseau to Proust to Hegel to de Man, this meditation on language, aesthetics, power and knowledge puts Wordsworth’s work into philosophical motion, uniting poetry, philosophy and the work of the critic herself in a common endeavor of making and/as knowing. * Helen Deutsch, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Part I. Language Theory and Poetics 1. Wordsworth and the “Material Difference” of the “Real Language of Men” 2. A “Complex Scene” 3. “What the Poet Does” 4. The Poetics of Contradiction 5. “The True Difficulty” 6. “Spontaneous Overflow” Staged Part II. “Real Language” in Action 7. “Strange Fits” 8. “A Slumber . . .” 9. “Imagination” Part III. Necessary Poetics: Theory of the Real 10. “The Real Horizon” (Beyond Emotion): “Living Things” “That Do Not Live Like Living Men,” or the “Path” of the Subject Crossed 11. “The Real Horizon” (Before Emotion): What Proust (Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had "in" Mind Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. HTrade Review[Theodor Fontane] suggests intriguing critical and theoretical reorientations. * The German Quarterly *An original and invigorating approach to the social novels of Theodor Fontane, this sensitive study examines how Fontane’s use of language traverses the gradations between avowal and irony. Tucker reveals that this 19th-century German novelist was a sharp observer and critic of the ‘Berlin idiom’ and its historical consequences. He demonstrates that, in the end and despite all his ironic play with language, Fontane seeks accuracy and reliability in human conversation, a ‘tighter . . . connection between words and things.’ Tucker’s insightful parsing of Fontane’s brilliant engagement with language inspires us to read these novels anew amid the delusions and confusions of our own ‘post-truth’ moment. * Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Director of Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, USA *In this important study, Brian Tucker examines the tension between serious and ironic language in Theodor Fontane’s work. By showing how Foucault’s concept of avowal can serve as an antidote to corrosive irony, Tucker demonstrates the ways in which Fontane’s fiction exposes the corruption of language in his contemporary Prussian society. Tucker develops his argument through lucid readings of Fontane’s major novels, challenging along the way the common assumption that linguistic decadence is the inevitable byproduct of historical change. The book makes a major contribution to Fontane scholarship and shows why Fontane’s writings continue to resonate deeply today. * Todd Kontje, Distinguished Professor and Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California at San Diego, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Editions and Translations Introduction 1. The Dilemma of Choice in Irrungen, Wirrungen 2. The Broken Word: On the Rhetoric of Trust and Honor in Schach von Wuthenow 3. Graf Petöfy and the Empty Vow 4. L’Adultera, Adulteration, and Avowal 5. Unwiederbringlich, or the Impotence of Being Earnest 6. Haunting Ambivalence: The Rhetorical Education of Effi Briest 7. All Talk: In Lieu of a Conclusion, Stechlin Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.Trade ReviewIn addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written. * Victorian Studies *A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *Table of ContentsPart One: Opening Conclusions1. "That Which Is Without"2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling"3. Aestheticism4. Answerable Style5. Historicism6. Aesthetic Historicism and "Aesthetic Poverty"7. The Poetics of RevivalPart Two: Figural Strategies in The Renaissance1. Legend and Historicity2. Myths of History: The Last Supper3. The Historicity of Myth4. Myths of History: The Mona Lisa5. Types and Figures6. Low and High Relief: "Luca Della Robbia"7. The Senses of ReliefPart Three: Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean1. The Transparent Hero2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist3. The Transcendental Induction4. Typology as Narrative Form5. Typological Ladders6. Christian Historicism7. Literary History as "Appreciation"Part Four: "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism1. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form4. The History of Philosophy5. The Anecdote of the Shell6. Dialogue and Dialectic7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind

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Book SynopsisFrom the teeming streets of Dickens''s London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the VictoTrade ReviewPopulating the Novel is an impressive and thought-provoking work. It lays down a gauntlet to other scholars for further examination of biopower and surplus in nineteenth-century literature and culture. * Dickens Quarterly *Steinlight's study moves across a truly impressive array of materials and does so without ever sacrificing close attention to the particular texts under consideration. The book moves fluently beyond the rigid periodizations that continue to govern the professional life of nineteenth-century scholars. * Modern Philology *Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. The argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. * Modern Language Review *Populating the Novel is a compelling, thought-provoking work of criticism. Steinlight's reading of traditional narratives in the nineteenth century helps redefine pre-existing ideas about the novel's cultural role while simultaneously considering how its form was heavily influenced by demographics. This significant contribution to scholarship helps reimagine life in the aggregate while demonstrating a unique approach to socio-political aspects of the English novel. * Victorian Review *A work of scholarship that fulfills and exceeds the multitude of promises contained in its title. After describing and delineating the overcrowded demographics of Romantic and Victorian writing, Steinlight makes a provocative claim about population: in an age of efflorescence of biopolitical principles and quantitative social science, population becomes a political, economic, sociological, and, above all, literary problem. * V21 Collations Book Forum *While England's population more than tripled during the nineteenth century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. * Studies in the Novel *

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Book SynopsisGod only knows how many diverse, captivating impressions and thoughts evoked by these impressions... pass in a single day. If it were only possible to render them in such a way that I could easily read myself and that others could read me as I do... Such was the desire of the young Tolstoy. Although he knew that this narrative utopiaturning the totality of his life into a bookwould remain unfulfilled, Tolstoy would spend the rest of his life attempting to achieve it. Who, What Am I? is an account of Tolstoy''s lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.This book guides readers through the voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings that Tolstoy produced from the 1850s until his death in 1910. The variety of these texts is enormous, including diaries, religious tracts, personal confessions, letters, autobiographical fragments, anTrade ReviewOffers a rare exploration into the internal world of Tolstoy by examining his nonfictional, first-person writings, including diaries, letters, reminiscences, autobiographical and confessional statements, and essays.... Paperno makes an invaluable contribution to Tolstoy scholarship. -- R. A. Erb * CHOICE *Paperno reads all his [Tolstoy’s] writings in relation to the central project of his life: the transformation of his life into a book that would teach others how to live.... ‘Who, What Am I?’ is an important book that will become a standard source for students, general readers and scholars alike. * SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW *Paperno deftly shows how Tolstoi's attempt to write an autobiography failed, but his perceived failure at capturing the moral, philosophical, and technical issues accurately becomes a testament to his literary honesty (102). "Who, What Am I?" is highly important for any Tolstoi researcher, as it brings together the whole of his writings dealing with the exploration of the self. -- Radha Balasubramanian * Slavic Review *This is a relatively short book, yet it is rich in content, taking on some of the most important and challenging problems Tolstoy faced as a writer and thinker. [Irina Paperno] draws on a full range of Tolstoy's nonfiction writings from the 1850s until his death in 1910: diaries, letters, reminiscences, autobiographical and confessional statements, essays, and religious tracts. In addition, her book is informed by vast reading in other sources, primary and secondary. -- Randall A. Poole * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1. "So That I Could Easily Read Myself": Tolstoy's Early DiariesTolstoy Starts a Diary—The Moral Vision of Self and the Temporal Order of Narrative—What Is Time? Cultural Precedents—“A History of Yesterday”— Time and Narrative—The Dream: The Hidden Recesses of Time—What Am I? The Young Tolstoy Defines Himself—What Am I? Cultural PrecedentsInterlude: Between Personal Documents and FictionFrom Diaries to Childhood: Tolstoy Becomes a Writer (1852)—“I Think I Will Never Write Again”: Tolstoy Attempts to Renounce Literature (1859)—“I . . . Don’t Even Think about the Accursed Lit-t-terature and Lit-t-terateurs”: Tolstoy Renounces Literature Again (1870); and Again (1874–75)Chapter 2. “To Tell One’s Faith Is Impossible. . . . How to Tell That Which I Live By. I’ll Tell You, All the Same. . . .” Tolstoy in His Correspondence“What Is My Life? What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Philosophical Dialogue with Nikolai Strakhov—“I Wish that You, Instead of Reading Anna Kar [ enina ], Would Finish It. . . .”—“In the Form of Catechism,” “In the Form of a Dialogue”—To Tell One’s Life—Rousseau and His Profession/Confession—The Parting of Ways: Tolstoy Writes His Confession, and Strakhov Continues to Confess in His Letters to TolstoyChapter 3. Tolstoy’s Confession : What Am I?Tolstoy Publishes his Confession—The Conversion Narrative: Excursus on the Genre—Tolstoy’s Confession : Step by Step—Tolstoy’s Confession Related to Rousseau’s and Augustine’s—After Confession: “Presenting Christ’s Teaching as Something New after 1,800 Years of Christianity”—Coda: Tolstoy’s InfluenceChapter 4. “To Write My Life ”: Tolstoy Tries, and Fails, to Produce a Memoir or AutobiographyThe Author Biography—“My Life”: “On the Basis of My Own Memories”—“Reminiscences”: “More Useful Than All That Artistic Prattle with Which the Twelve Volumes of My Works Are Filled”—“Reminiscences”: “I Cannot Provide a Coherent Description of Events and States of Mind”—“The Green Stick”: “Où Suis-Je? Pourquoi Suis-Je? Que Suis-Je?”—Tolstoy and the Autobiographical TraditionChapter 5. “What Should We Do Then?”: Tolstoy on Self and Other“Why Have You, a Man from a Different World, Stopped near Us? Who Are You?”—Master and Slave: Tolstoy Rewrites Hegel—Tolstoy and the Washerwoman—The Order of Things: The Church, the State, the Arts and Sciences—“Master and Man”—Coda: Nonparticipation in EvilChapter 6. “I Felt a Completely New Liberation from Personality”: Tolstoy’s Late DiariesTolstoy Resumes his Diary—The Temporal Order of Narrative: The Last Day—“On Life and Death ”—The Diary as a Spiritual Exercise—“I, the Body, Is Such a Disgusting Chamber Pot”—“I Am Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself. . . .”—“I Have Lost the Memory of Everything, Almost Everything. . . . How Can One Not Rejoice at the Loss of Memory?”—Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening—Tolstoy’s Dreams—Dreams: The World beyond Time and Representation—The Book of life: “It Is Written on Time”—The Circle of Reading: “To Replace the Consciousness of Leo Tolstoy with the Consciousness of All Humankind”—“The Death of Socrates”—Tolstoy’s DeathAppendix: Russian QuotationsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHomicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 17981860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the unwritten law of a husband''s revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of andTrade ReviewHomicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is an excellent reference work, one that I will use often in determining the full implication of such acts as murder and seduction, not only in pre–Civil War fiction, but also in social and psychological attitudes of the same period. -- Philip Durham * American Quarterly *Because the approach to an old problem is new, the book is stimulating. Because its treatment is not definitive it is provocative. It is the sort of writing that might well be used to initiate interdisciplinary discussions on both content and method. -- Albert Morris * American Sociological Review *

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Book SynopsisProstitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seductionthe Victorian fallen woman represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.Trade ReviewAs the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’ * CHOICE *Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties. -- Sally Mitchell * Victorian Studies *

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Book SynopsisIn The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a veTrade ReviewThe One, Other, and Only Dickens is sui generis... Stewart offers an exuberant appreciation of Dickens's language, a celebration of craft.... Stewart points toward a return to the pleasurable, slow reading of both criticism and primary texts, but Stewart champions sustained and passionate attentiveness as integral to that process. Stewart's lovely reading, and writing, will be a pleasure to readers who agree with Thackeray's 1847 appraisal of Dickens that 'There's no writing against such power as this-one has no chance!' * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *A series of compelling readings from the inklings of nebulous popular consensus. * Dickens Quarterly *Passage after passage of this kind not only leave you feeling as if you have consistently under-read Dickens, but also, retracing Stewart's granular detail, that Dickens is the unequaled master of English prose, the only peer in prose to Shakespeare in verse. * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsForeword: Preparing the Way Introduction: Some "Reagions" for Reading 1. Shorthand Speech / Longhand Sound 2. Secret Prose / Sequestered Poetics 3. Phrasing Astraddle 4. Reading Lessens Afterword: "That Very Word, Reading" Endpiece: The One and T'Otherest Notes Index

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Book SynopsisSixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable''s protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians'' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholarsMalcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracysuggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens'' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens chanTrade ReviewThis book will delight Dickens scholars and prove an asset to any university library.... It is one that will inspire readers to consider the changes the great writer has wrought in them, and that they, in their turn, may bring to Dickens scholarship. * Modern Language Review *This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors... consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others.... As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens's discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later. * Dickens Quarterly *An enjoyable and wide-ranging collection of articles exploring Dickens and change. * English Studies *Excellent discussions of condition-of-England novels. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Changing Dickens I. Dickens and Social Change Repetitions and Reversals: Patterns for Social Change in Pickwick Papers Three Revolutions: Alternate Routes to Social Change in Bleak House Dickens, Society, and Art: Change in Dickens's View of Effecting Social Reform The World Changing Dickens, Dickens Changing the World II. Dickens and Changes of Power Parrots, Birds of Prey, and Snorting Cattle: Dickens's Whig Agenda "The Tremendous Potency of the Small": Dickens, the Individual, and Social Change in a Post-America, Post-Catastrophist Age Money, Power, and Appearance in Dombey and Son III. Dickens and Literary Change The Passing of the Pickwick Moment The Chimes and the Rhythm of Life Radical Dickens: Dickens and the Tradition of Romantic Radicalism Modern Characters in the Late Novels of Charles Dickens IV. Dickens and Changes in Popular Culture and in the Theater The Cultural Politics of Dickens's Hard Times Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop Popular Dickens: Changing Bleak House for the East End Stage The Frozen Deep: Gad's Hill, June-July 1857 How to Read Dickens in English: A Last Retrospect Index

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Book SynopsisSixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable''s protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians'' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholarsMalcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracysuggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens'' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens chanTrade ReviewThis book will delight Dickens scholars and prove an asset to any university library.... It is one that will inspire readers to consider the changes the great writer has wrought in them, and that they, in their turn, may bring to Dickens scholarship. * Modern Language Review *This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors... consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others.... As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens's discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later. * Dickens Quarterly *An enjoyable and wide-ranging collection of articles exploring Dickens and change. * English Studies *Excellent discussions of condition-of-England novels. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Changing Dickens I. Dickens and Social Change Repetitions and Reversals: Patterns for Social Change in Pickwick Papers Three Revolutions: Alternate Routes to Social Change in Bleak House Dickens, Society, and Art: Change in Dickens's View of Effecting Social Reform The World Changing Dickens, Dickens Changing the World II. Dickens and Changes of Power Parrots, Birds of Prey, and Snorting Cattle: Dickens's Whig Agenda "The Tremendous Potency of the Small": Dickens, the Individual, and Social Change in a Post-America, Post-Catastrophist Age Money, Power, and Appearance in Dombey and Son III. Dickens and Literary Change The Passing of the Pickwick Moment The Chimes and the Rhythm of Life Radical Dickens: Dickens and the Tradition of Romantic Radicalism Modern Characters in the Late Novels of Charles Dickens IV. Dickens and Changes in Popular Culture and in the Theater The Cultural Politics of Dickens's Hard Times Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop Popular Dickens: Changing Bleak House for the East End Stage The Frozen Deep: Gad's Hill, June-July 1857 How to Read Dickens in English: A Last Retrospect Index

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Book SynopsisIn Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called the provincesa place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature''s representation of the nation''s space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficultTrade ReviewThis is another excellent release in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies... a nuanced and enlightening book written in clear, jargon-free prose. * Choice *This highly important book provides a new understanding of what the author calls the provincial trope in Russian literature.The book has significant implications for history as well as literary criticism. * The Russian Review *The book's scope is one of its strongest qualities: Lounsbery goes beyond Gogol' and Chekhov and includes a range of other writers' uses of the provincial trope. The result is a fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the symbolic geography of Russian nineteenth-century literature. * Slavonic and East European Review *This book does a rare thing: it takes a topic that all readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature think they understand, provintsiia, and demonstrates that this apparently selfevident construct, associated with boredom and meaninglessness, is multifaceted, vibrant, and significant. In so doing, Life is Elsewhere genuinely transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *Life Is Elsewhere is a striking example of a successful thematic approach to literary analysis. At the same time, it is a bold re-evaluation of overlooked themes and texts in Russian literature, lending itself both to classroom discussion and to the rediscovery of individual writers in new contexts. * Modern Language Review *This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written.Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation 1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground 2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin's Countryside 3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or "Everything is Barbarous and Horrid" (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others) 4. "This is Paris itself!": Gogol in the Town of N 5. "I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!": Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste 6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev's Cosmopolitans 7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces 8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia? 9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 10. "Everything Here is Accidental": Chekhov's Geography of Meaninglessness 11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality 12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called the provincesa place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature''s representation of the nation''s space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficultTrade ReviewThis is another excellent release in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies... a nuanced and enlightening book written in clear, jargon-free prose. * Choice *This highly important book provides a new understanding of what the author calls the provincial trope in Russian literature.The book has significant implications for history as well as literary criticism. * The Russian Review *The book's scope is one of its strongest qualities: Lounsbery goes beyond Gogol' and Chekhov and includes a range of other writers' uses of the provincial trope. The result is a fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the symbolic geography of Russian nineteenth-century literature. * Slavonic and East European Review *This book does a rare thing: it takes a topic that all readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature think they understand, provintsiia, and demonstrates that this apparently selfevident construct, associated with boredom and meaninglessness, is multifaceted, vibrant, and significant. In so doing, Life is Elsewhere genuinely transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *Life Is Elsewhere is a striking example of a successful thematic approach to literary analysis. At the same time, it is a bold re-evaluation of overlooked themes and texts in Russian literature, lending itself both to classroom discussion and to the rediscovery of individual writers in new contexts. * Modern Language Review *This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written.Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation 1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground 2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin's Countryside 3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or "Everything is Barbarous and Horrid" (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others) 4. "This is Paris itself!": Gogol in the Town of N 5. "I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!": Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste 6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev's Cosmopolitans 7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces 8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia? 9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 10. "Everything Here is Accidental": Chekhov's Geography of Meaninglessness 11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality 12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn Heaven''s Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women''s individual agency and collective action.Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook ediTable of ContentsIntroduction: Writing Women's Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America 1. "My Resolve Is the Feminine of My Father's Oath": Ritual Agency and Religious Language in the Early National Historical Novel 2. "Unsheathe the Sword of a Strong, Unbending Will": Sentimental Agency and the Doctrinal Work of Woman's Fiction 3. "I Have Sinned against God and Myself ": Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women's Agency in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 4. "The Human Soul...Makes All Things Sacred": Communal Agency in the Theological Romances of Harriet Beecher Stowe 5. "I Have No Disbelief ": Women's Spiritualist Novels and Nonliberal Agencies Conclusion: Women's Religious Agency Today

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Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a lady novelist. As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents'' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it.Exploring the connections between Woolf''s immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation''s concerns and controversies to Woolf''s considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf''s creative works, politics, and criticism in Trade ReviewCorbett's meticulously researched study... locates influence socially as well as literarily, and details the societal changes wrought by the female Victorian writers... * Choice *In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Well-written and well-informed, this book draws on the latest debates in Woolf scholarship concerning public life, political activism, the professions, and history, and it adds an important dimension to discussion of Woolf and the Victorians. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *The book provides a road map to guide us through the obscured routes of Woolf's neglected second-generation female predecessors. Corbett makes us pause to consider diversions from the Victorian male-dominated high road trodden by Woolf's father's venerated literary companions—Hardy, James, Meredith—and in some ways by Woolf herself. Through extensive research—patiently plodding along these archival paths—Corbett has made some of those second-generation voices more richly accessible to us. * Virginia Wolf Miscellany *A considerable achievement. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the 'exceptional' modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women; perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that. * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Gender, Greatness, and the "Third Generation" Interlude I: Grand Reads Woolf 2. New Women and Old: Sarah Grand, Social Purity, and The Voyage Out Interlude II: Disinterestedness 3. "Ashamed of the Inkpot": Woolf and the Literary Marketplace Interlude III: Duckworth and Company 4. "To Serve and Bless": Julia Stephen, Isabel Somerset, and Late-Victorian Women's Politics Interlude IV: Somerset, Symonds,Stephen, and Sexuality 5. "A Diferent Ideal": Representing the Public Woman

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Book SynopsisThe Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion''s socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkersincluding Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontëwhose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London''s sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventTrade ReviewThe assiduity with which Samalin has charted 1857 to 1860 is complemented by the laser-like precision with which he has uncovered a valuable array of arguments and ideas that would be largely illegible without the cogent and precise accounting of disgust this book ably puts forth. * Victorian Studies *This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. [Tthe book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as "political aesthetics." * Modern Philology *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Origins and Orifices Part I: The Rationalization of Revulsion 1. The Odor of Things 2. Realism and Repulsion Part II.: Primal Scenes, Human Sciences 3. Darwin's Vomit 4. The Masses Are Revolting; or, The Birth of Social Theory from the Spirit of Disgust Part III: The Disenchantment of Disgust 5. The Age of Obscenity Conclusion: Horizons of Expectoration

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Book SynopsisIn Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville''s abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville''s creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work.Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments.With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader''s understanding of the moralTrade ReviewThis book has an added advantage of serving as a reader's guide to the novel, one which will be indispensable to any serious reader of Moby-Dick, whether for the first or the twentieth time. * Sewanee Review *The best reading of this iconic novel in recent memory. Under Cook's expert eye, Moby-Dick divulges secrets of the Second Coming and Melville's conflicting religious inclinations. Cook's masterful and wide-ranging command of Melville's library makes Moby-Dick into a guided tour through the Western canon. * Religion & Literature *Of all books about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (and there are many), Jonathan A. Cook's is one that needed to be written. Cook organizes this potentially unwieldy and unfathomable topic in a way that scholars will find useful as a reference for repeated consultation. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *

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Book SynopsisFrom the teeming streets of Dickens''s London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the VictoTrade ReviewPopulating the Novel is an impressive and thought-provoking work. It lays down a gauntlet to other scholars for further examination of biopower and surplus in nineteenth-century literature and culture. * Dickens Quarterly *Steinlight's study moves across a truly impressive array of materials and does so without ever sacrificing close attention to the particular texts under consideration. The book moves fluently beyond the rigid periodizations that continue to govern the professional life of nineteenth-century scholars. * Modern Philology *Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. The argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. * Modern Language Review *Populating the Novel is a compelling, thought-provoking work of criticism. Steinlight's reading of traditional narratives in the nineteenth century helps redefine pre-existing ideas about the novel's cultural role while simultaneously considering how its form was heavily influenced by demographics. This significant contribution to scholarship helps reimagine life in the aggregate while demonstrating a unique approach to socio-political aspects of the English novel. * Victorian Review *A work of scholarship that fulfills and exceeds the multitude of promises contained in its title. After describing and delineating the overcrowded demographics of Romantic and Victorian writing, Steinlight makes a provocative claim about population: in an age of efflorescence of biopolitical principles and quantitative social science, population becomes a political, economic, sociological, and, above all, literary problem. * V21 Collations Book Forum *While England's population more than tripled during the nineteenth century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. * Studies in the Novel *

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Book SynopsisDickens''s Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens''s use of low and slangular (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens''s use of bodily idiomsright-hand man, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstoneagainst the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London''s streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the

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Book SynopsisDickens''s Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens''s use of low and slangular (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens''s use of bodily idiomsright-hand man, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstoneagainst the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London''s streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the

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Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death across America, Europe, and the Russian Empire. The incurable disease gave rise to a culture of convalescence, creating new opportunities for travel and literary reflection. Tubercular Capital tells the story of Yiddish and Hebrew writers whose lives and work were transformed by a tubercular diagnosis. Moving from eastern Europe to the Italian Peninsula, and from Mandate Palestine to the Rocky Mountains, Sunny S. Yudkoff follows writers including Sholem Aleichem, Raḥel Bluvshtein, David Vogel, and others as they sought "the cure" and drew on their experiences of illness to hone their literary craft. Combining archival research with literary analysis, Yudkoff uncovers how tuberculosis came to function as an agent of modern Jewish literature. The illness would provide the means for these suffering writers to grow their reputations and find financial backing. It served a central role in the public fashioning of their literary personas and ushered Jewish writers into a variety of intersecting English, German, and Russian literary traditions. Tracing the paths of these writers, Tubercular Capital reconsiders the foundational relationship between disease, biography, and literature.Trade Review"This brilliant study combines thorough historical research with a fine-grained analysis of texts produced under the shadow of the 'White Death,' all framed by a powerful account of the cultural and economic matrix within which both the career of the individual poet and the tradition of tubercular writing are most fruitfully articulated." -- Ernest B. Gilman * New York University *"Resisting the sentimental transformation of illness into metaphor described by Susan Sontag, while attending to the persistently romanticized 'consumptive artist,' Sunny Yudkoff's brilliant study provides a new model for understanding the relationship between literary creativity and tuberculosis. Tubercular Capital argues that writers strategically mobilized their tuberculosis, both for their careers and in their work, even as they were laid low by disease. From Sholem Aleichem's 'tubercular Jubilee' to the sickrooms and sanatoria of other Hebrew and Yiddish writers, tuberculosis was inextricable from the burgeoning of early twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture." -- Naomi Seidman * University of Toronto *"Yudkoff's exploration seamlessly merges speculation with concrete history....Tempting as it may be to imbue illness with its own transcendental power, she chooses to depict its force with a more material and pragmatic truth, warning of the dangerous contortions of pain that come with romanticization." -- Arshy Azizi * Los Angeles Review of Books *"This research on the role that tuberculosis played in the lives and creative output of modern Jewish writers is original and fascinating....Highly recommended for academic libraries collecting in the area of Jewish culture and literature." -- Yaffa Weisman * Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter *"A major asset of [Tubercular Capital] is the fact that it retains an unromanticized view of suffering artists, which is even more important when examining their treasured poetic work." -- Heidi Stern * The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Jewish Literature and Tubercular Capital chapter abstractThe Introduction sets the stage for a larger investigation into the intersection of tuberculosis, biography, and literary output. To do so, the Introduction offers an account of the state of Yiddish and Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century as well as an overview of various cultural-historical connotations of tuberculosis among Jewish and non-Jewish readers. This includes an examination of Romantic notions about consumption, anti-Semitic discourses surrounding tuberculosis, and the reputation of the disease among Zionists, communists, and Jewish public health officials across the globe. The Introduction further introduces the methodological intervention of the study—tubercular capital—by bringing together sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" with anthropologist Didier Fassin's investigations into the "politics of life." 1In the Hands of Every Reader: Sholem Aleichem's Tubercular Jubilee chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by disease in the life and career of the classic Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (né Sholem Rabinovitsh). After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1908, a global campaign known as "The Jubilee" was initiated to help the destitute author recuperate in Nervi, Italy. Drawing on archival sources, newspaper articles, and multiple memoirs, this chapter plots how the campaign promoted the author's reputation, stabilized his finances, and inaugurated the first formal stage of literary-critical assessments of his work. It further analyzes the importance of tuberculosis in Sholem Aleichem's literary output, in the development of his literary persona, and in the establishment of a mutually-effective relationship with his readership. 2In a Sickroom of Her Own: Raḥel Bluvshtein's Tubercular Poetry chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role of tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew poet known as Raḥel. To do so, the chapter draws on the comparative model of the Victorian sickroom to examine how Raḥel transformed the space of her recuperation into a veritable salon of literary exchange and creativity. Reading Raḥel's correspondence and poetry and drawing on the memoiristic accounts published by her visitors, this chapter reveals that Raḥel's Tel Aviv sickroom became the center of her public self-fashioning as an ailing female poet. The sickroom further serves as the key for interpreting the link between Raḥel's poetics of space, simplicity (pashtut), and the spread (hitpashtut) of disease. This chapter also sharpens scholarly understanding of Raḥel's literary biography by situating her work within an Eastern European Romantic tradition of writing about consumption that stands in tension with contemporaneous Zionist ideas concerning illness. 3In the Kingdom of Fever: The Writers of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the literary scene of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society (JCRS), a Coloradan sanatorium for indigent Jews. There, a cohort of Yiddish tubercular writers engaged in a reciprocal relationship with the institution, becoming the public faces of the sanatorium and, in turn, being offered new venues to see their work published and translated. These writers include the lyric poet and Bible translator Yehoash, the epic poet H. Leivick, and the prose stylist Shea Tenenbaum. Drawing on archival records, newspaper reports, and memoirs, the chapter further explores how the JCRS supported the establishment of a tubercular American Yiddish literary tradition. 4In the Sanatorium: David Vogel Between Hebrew and German chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew modernist David Vogel. After taking the cure in Merano, Italy in the winters of 1925 and 1926, he published his first novella, Be-vet ha-marpe (In the Sanatorium) in 1927. The text draws heavily on the tropes and concerns of German-language sanatorium fiction, including works by Arthur Schnitzler, Klabund, and Thomas Mann. Specifically, this chapter argues that Vogel writes his account of the sanatorium in a tense intertextual exchange with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). Vogel challenges the possibility of a Hebrew-German literary conversation through a series of interlingual puns, wordplays, and jokes about tuberculosis. Illness emerges in this chapter as the hermeneutic key to Vogel's modernism. Epilogue: After the Cure chapter abstractThis chapter explores post-Holocaust iterations of tuberculosis and sanatoria in the work of the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. Although he did not suffer from tuberculosis, Appelfeld frequently turns to the disease and its institutions, such as in his 1975 novella, Badenheim, 'ir nofesh (English: Badenheim 1939). Bringing his work into dialogue with the texts of the tubercular writers of the pre-WWII period, this chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of tubercular capital as a methodological prism and analytic category, even after a diagnosis of tuberculosis was no longer commonplace among modern Jewish writers.

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Book SynopsisPhonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.Trade Review"Camlot's riveting account of the oldest surviving poetry recordings delivers one dazzling close listening after another. Not a crackle, hum, trill, or vibrato goes unnoticed by the author's exquisitely tuned ear. Drawing on a lifetime spent in the company of vintage phonographs, Phonopoetics will be an essential guide to historic spoken word recordings of literature." -- Matthew Rubery * Queen Mary University of London *"Phonopoetics is a book best appreciated 'in stereo' as a fresh and compelling perspective on the early phonograph industry and a generative new framework for understanding the culture and practice of poetry recitation." -- Jacob Smith * Northwestern University *"Camlot challenges assumptions of contemporary literary criticism by taking the heard audio-text as a primary object of analysis....Recommended." -- S. Schmidt Horning * CHOICE *"Camlot breaks entirely new ground. His study provides, without exaggeration, something truly original for the field of sound studies, opening up entirely new archives and objects of analysis, new questions and answers." -- Tyler Whitney * Modernism/modernity *"Camlot's groundbreaking work teaches us myriad techniques for newly engaging with the audible content of media artifacts. His Phonopoetics models for us a novel audiotextual criticism and form of close listening through which we may freshly access the signals of some of history's earliest recorded sounds." -- Andrew Burkett * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Audiotextual Criticism chapter abstractThe introduction explores the strange sonic and material qualities of early sound recordings and outlines a methodology for the critical study of early spoken recordings as literary artifacts. It defines concepts that are at the core of the book, including the meaning of "literary recording", "sound", "signal", "audiotextual genres" and "sound media formats." In outlining a sound-based approach to literary studies, and in considering the synergies between textual criticism and literary sound recordings, it provides a schema for the pursuit of audiotextual criticism, that is, the formal and historical study of literary sound recordings. 1The Voice of the Phonograph chapter abstractChapter 1 analyzes the early promotional discourse surrounding the phonograph as a medium of natural fidelity and then situates the idea of the phonograph as a "pure voice" medium within the context of popular recitation anthologies in order to identify key elocutionary preconceptions that informed the vocal performances heard in early spoken recordings. In revealing the affinities that existed between late Victorian short spoken recordings and the brief texts meant for speaking aloud that were collected in nineteenth-century recitation anthologies, this opening chapter explains the preconceived notions about the phonograph as a new media technology and the significance of sound recording for the performance of literary texts, in particular. 2Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction chapter abstractChapter 2 focuses on the development and production of the earliest sound recordings drawn from the novels of Charles Dickens. The Dickens recordings of Bransby Williams and William Sterling Battis stand as the earliest fiction-based audio adaptations produced specifically for pedagogical application, and represent an interesting bridge between earlier conceptions of the talking record as a novel form of popular entertainment and the later, pedagogically motivated category of the literary recording. To shed light on the historical transition from "talking record" to "literary recording" and the emergence of what we now call educational technology, this chapter examines the particular kinds of literary adaptation in early recordings produced specifically for teaching literature in the classroom. 3Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Spectral Energy: Historical Intonation in Dramatic Recitation chapter abstractChapter 3 tells the story of the multiple recordings made between 1890 and 1920, both by the poet himself and by actors and elocutionists, of Tennyson's poem "The Charge of The Light Brigade." It analyzes the kinds of performance and genre that informed the production of these recordings and locates the speech sounds heard on them in debates of the period about elocution and verse speaking. An account of late Victorian methods of "dramatic" interpretation as elaborated by Samuel Silas Curry in Imagination and Dramatic Instinct opens into a longer genealogy of oral interpretation, and considers the import of New Criticism as a method of literary interpretation that worked to silence oral performance in the classroom. The close listening in this chapter also explores the potential of digital speech analysis tools to help us to fix and visualize elocutionary, prosodic features of these recordings of "Charge." 4T. S. Eliot's Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking chapter abstractChapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot's 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot's attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry. Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter situates Eliot's audible reading experiments within contemporary debates surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot's work for the BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot's reading experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in reading. Eliot's method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the abstract conception of "voice" that functions as an organizing principle in New Critical discourse. Eliot's recorded readings are heard to sound an organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an overarching oracular or otherworldly voice. Conclusion: Conclusion: Analog, Digital, Conceptual chapter abstractThe Conclusion to Phonopoetics explores conceptions of voice preservation and models of the voice archive. It takes early ideas of the audible archival artifact (the sound recording) and the event-oriented scenario of its use as useful points of departure for a historically motivated theorization of the voice recording and voice archive at the present time. Specifically, it considers the impact of digital media technologies on the status of the record and its archive. The Conclusion mediates on how the analogue artifact of the sound archive has shaped our ideas and expectations about what a digital repository should be, and reflects on the status of the artifact of study as we move increasingly from the study of material media artifacts to virtual instantiations of the signals those media may once have held, in the form of digital media files.

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Book SynopsisThe Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt—Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.Trade Review"Elegantly parsing both continuities and discontinuities in racial formation from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Caroline Yang charts the peculiar survivals of the minstrel form. The power of antiblackness to deform Blackness and Chineseness on both stage and page is everywhere evident in this assiduously researched and argued book." -- Tavia Nyong'o * Yale University *"The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery offers fascinating new insights into minstrelsy as an enduring cultural form. Caroline Yang's nuanced comparative analyses enrich by challenging us to reconceptualize minstrelsy in the development of US literature and our ideas of the 'West.'" -- Edlie L. Wong * University of Maryland, College Park *"Yang provides new insights into the role of blackface minstrelsy in the post–Civil War period, particularly in California....Readers should bear in mind that the author's aim is not to explore the personal racism of any given author. Rather, it is to elucidate an evolving system of racial representation deployed across literature and popular culture that underpinned white supremacy, US imperialism, and settler colonialism. Recommended." -- J. R. Wendland * CHOICE *"Situating the 'Chinese question' in relation to Reconstruction, The Peculiar Afterlife assiduously documents continuities between the white supremacy of the antebellum South and the racial logics of the frontier... Yang's excavation of the Chinese worker's representational ties to blackface minstrelsy provides a timely illustration of the pervasive and constitutive role of antiblackness in US racial discourses." -- Amy C. Tang * The American Literary History Online Review *

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Book SynopsisThe Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt—Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.Trade Review"Elegantly parsing both continuities and discontinuities in racial formation from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Caroline Yang charts the peculiar survivals of the minstrel form. The power of antiblackness to deform Blackness and Chineseness on both stage and page is everywhere evident in this assiduously researched and argued book." -- Tavia Nyong'o * Yale University *"The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery offers fascinating new insights into minstrelsy as an enduring cultural form. Caroline Yang's nuanced comparative analyses enrich by challenging us to reconceptualize minstrelsy in the development of US literature and our ideas of the 'West.'" -- Edlie L. Wong * University of Maryland, College Park *"Yang provides new insights into the role of blackface minstrelsy in the post–Civil War period, particularly in California....Readers should bear in mind that the author's aim is not to explore the personal racism of any given author. Rather, it is to elucidate an evolving system of racial representation deployed across literature and popular culture that underpinned white supremacy, US imperialism, and settler colonialism. Recommended." -- J. R. Wendland * CHOICE *"Situating the 'Chinese question' in relation to Reconstruction, The Peculiar Afterlife assiduously documents continuities between the white supremacy of the antebellum South and the racial logics of the frontier... Yang's excavation of the Chinese worker's representational ties to blackface minstrelsy provides a timely illustration of the pervasive and constitutive role of antiblackness in US racial discourses." -- Amy C. Tang * The American Literary History Online Review *

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Book SynopsisThe enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.Trade Review"Complex and subtle in theoretical approach, sensitive to the slow time of historical transformation, and written with great clarity and energy, this is a carefully researched book animated by a powerful and timely argument for the distinctive power of literature to capture experiences of the 'unenclosed' and to convey a sense of futural possibilities."—Amanda Anderson, Brown University"Reconceiving enclosure as a form of slow violence akin to other forms of environmental dispossession, Carolyn Lesjak generates deep and entirely new readings of the Victorian realist novel. Her analysis approaches literature as a political resource for the ongoing struggle against neoliberalism's destruction of the commons."—Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis"The Afterlife of Enclosure is a remarkable text that extends the ideas of Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams in its timely understanding of enclosures as local phenomena with global reach and ultimate catalysts for contemporary catastrophes... [Lesjak's] monograph itself becomes a radical thought experiment, in line with popular forms of resistance, as Lesjak's investigation of 19th-century novels as material artefacts is transformed into a call to action for sociopolitical change."—Sophia Möllers, Journal for the Study of British Cultures"By illuminating how nineteenth-century realist fiction can serve as an atlas to our enclosed world, Lesjak provides a model of reading that is at once critical and reparative, deeply historical and attuned to the crises of the present."—Gregory Vargo, Modern Philology"Carolyn Lesjak's [The Afterlife of Enclosure] is a deeply researched, lucid and broadly compelling study that simultaneously brings new attention to an understudied connection between social history and nineteenth-century fiction, challenges longstanding critical assumptions about the intrinsic value of forms of novelistic characterization, and valuably interrogates the often unquestioned alignment between the canonical texts it considers and the evolution of Victorian liberalism."—Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"Taking down the fence and finding common ground to start broader public conversations about the enduring legacies of race and colonialism in nineteenth-century literature feel like the right task. But if anything, that makes a study like Lesjak's, which conveys the power of these great works to imagine a world otherwise, only more vital as a resource of hope and optimism of the will for what is ahead."—Ruth Livesey, Victorian Literature and CultureTable of ContentsIntroduction: Realism and the Commons 1. The Persistence of the Commons, The Persistence of Enclosure 2. Dickensian Types and a Culture of the Commons 3. Eliot, Cosmopolitanism, and the Commons 4. The Typical and the Tragic in Hardy's Geopolitical Commons Afterword: Old and New Enclosures

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Book SynopsisNotework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures. Trade Review"Encountering writers' notebooks on their own terms, Simon Reader carves out fresh and rewarding territory in the landscape of Victorian studies. Notework offers brilliant, wide-ranging commentary on little-studied archival materials in dialogue with, but not subordinated to, well-known works of the period."—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia"Written in an energetic, witty, and clear style, Notework is full of interest and fresh insight—an unexpected and provocative view on material that has wider implications for how we read."—Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford"Contrasting with the disjointed fragments he quotes, Reader's own fluent and energetic style guides us through discussions of formalism generally, and Formalism in particular, into the direct engagement that he promises."—Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement"Notework offers a major contribution to the genre theory and the history of reading because it makes valuable, really for the first time, an absolutely ubiquitous practice... Reader's approach can return us to the archive and attune us beyond the canon because it so profoundly values formal multiplicity."—Elisha Cohn, Modern Philology"Critics often view authorial notes as adjunct to the study of major works, and this purpose is still central. However, Reader contends, in addition to providing insight into the creative process, notes serve as a distinct body of literary work... Incidentally, his observations about the disconnected nature of communication in social media (think Twitter) lead one to wonder how these instances of "note work" might figure as a genre to future readers."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICE"As a study in how to interpret those primary sources that make up much of nineteenth-century literary history, Notework is an engaging reimagining of the Victorian information landscape and an important reconsideration of how literary studies treats ephemera in the nineteenth century and beyond.... Notework promises to be a cornerstone in the aesthetics of information and in the ongoing reassessment of the parts of the long nineteenth century that carry into our present."—Sierra Eckert, Modern Language Quarterly"Simon Reader's 'notework,' a new and happily-coined literary term, avoids the book in 'notebook' while evoking the dream in 'dreamwork' and the art in 'artwork.' In other words, the term itself does a lot of work for this excellent study of important noteworks in Victorian literature. By conceptualizing and naming it, Reader's term will generate further work on this novel genre."—Carolyn Williams, Prose Studies

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Book SynopsisThe enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.Trade Review"Complex and subtle in theoretical approach, sensitive to the slow time of historical transformation, and written with great clarity and energy, this is a carefully researched book animated by a powerful and timely argument for the distinctive power of literature to capture experiences of the 'unenclosed' and to convey a sense of futural possibilities."—Amanda Anderson, Brown University"Reconceiving enclosure as a form of slow violence akin to other forms of environmental dispossession, Carolyn Lesjak generates deep and entirely new readings of the Victorian realist novel. Her analysis approaches literature as a political resource for the ongoing struggle against neoliberalism's destruction of the commons."—Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis"The Afterlife of Enclosure is a remarkable text that extends the ideas of Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams in its timely understanding of enclosures as local phenomena with global reach and ultimate catalysts for contemporary catastrophes... [Lesjak's] monograph itself becomes a radical thought experiment, in line with popular forms of resistance, as Lesjak's investigation of 19th-century novels as material artefacts is transformed into a call to action for sociopolitical change."—Sophia Möllers, Journal for the Study of British Cultures"By illuminating how nineteenth-century realist fiction can serve as an atlas to our enclosed world, Lesjak provides a model of reading that is at once critical and reparative, deeply historical and attuned to the crises of the present."—Gregory Vargo, Modern Philology"Carolyn Lesjak's [The Afterlife of Enclosure] is a deeply researched, lucid and broadly compelling study that simultaneously brings new attention to an understudied connection between social history and nineteenth-century fiction, challenges longstanding critical assumptions about the intrinsic value of forms of novelistic characterization, and valuably interrogates the often unquestioned alignment between the canonical texts it considers and the evolution of Victorian liberalism."—Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"Taking down the fence and finding common ground to start broader public conversations about the enduring legacies of race and colonialism in nineteenth-century literature feel like the right task. But if anything, that makes a study like Lesjak's, which conveys the power of these great works to imagine a world otherwise, only more vital as a resource of hope and optimism of the will for what is ahead."—Ruth Livesey, Victorian Literature and CultureTable of ContentsIntroduction: Realism and the Commons 1. The Persistence of the Commons, The Persistence of Enclosure 2. Dickensian Types and a Culture of the Commons 3. Eliot, Cosmopolitanism, and the Commons 4. The Typical and the Tragic in Hardy's Geopolitical Commons Afterword: Old and New Enclosures

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Book SynopsisNovels are often said to help us understand how others think—especially when those others are profoundly different from us. When interpreting a character's behavior, readers are believed to make use of "Theory of Mind," the general human capacity to attribute mental states to other people. In many well-known nineteenth-century American novels, however, characters behave in ways that are opaque to readers, other characters, and even themselves, undermining efforts to explain their actions in terms of mental states like beliefs and intentions. Writing the Mind dives into these unintelligible moments to map the weaknesses of Theory of Mind and explore alternative frameworks for interpreting behavior. Through readings of authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Martin Delany, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, Hannah Walser explains how experimental models of cognition lead to some of the strangest formal features of canonical American texts. These authors' attempts to found social life on something other than mental states not only invite us to revise our assumptions about the centrality of mind reading and empathy to the novel as a form; they can also help us understand more contemporary concepts in social cognition, including gaslighting and learned helplessness, with more conceptual rigor and historical depth.Trade Review"This deeply interdisciplinary book is also a call to literary scholars to attend to the ways in which cognitive theory can enhance our understanding of how fiction operates formally. Elegantly written, thoughtful, and thorough."—Justine S. Murison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"Walser provides a stunning reevaluation of the work fiction does to experiment with the problem of other people's minds. Essential for scholars interested in thinking about social cognition, cognitive diversity, and how those phenomena were explored in the nineteenth century."—Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University"Writing the Mind carefully parses through canonical nineteenth-century American texts, sagaciously teasing new readings from familiar and rich passages. Covering a stunning array of primary texts and theorists, Walser offers a compelling new lens through which to read the socio-cognition of some of the nineteenth-century's most familiar, if baffling, characters."—Kassie Jo Baron, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward a Literary History of Cognition 1. Boundedness 2. Epistemic Reality 3. Causal Power 4. Responsibility

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Book SynopsisUncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the traitorous sycophant that his name connotes today. Adena Spingarn traces his evolution in the American imagination, offering the first comprehensive account of a figure central to American conversations about race and racial representation from 1852 to the present. We learn of the radical political potential of the novel's many theatrical spinoffs even in the Jim Crow era, Uncle Tom's breezy disavowal by prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and a developing critique of "Uncle Tom roles" in Hollywood. Within the stubborn American binary of black and white, citizens have used this rhetorical figure to debate the boundaries of racial difference and the legacy of slavery. Through Uncle Tom, black Americans have disputed various strategies for racial progress and defined the most desirable and harmful images of black personhood in literature and popular culture.Trade Review"Stowe's blockbuster novel continues to provoke debate and touch raw nerves. For Adena Spingarn, it serves as an introduction to the long history of haggling over the meanings of race in America. There are numerous studies of Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is the richest, most provocative, and most stylishly written of the lot."—Benjamin Reiss, Emory University"Adena Spingarn's grand history of Uncle Tom is both a rich study of the nineteenth-century reception of the novel and a timely analysis of the twentieth-century role of Jim Crow, the myth of the Lost Cause, and the codes of Hollywood in reshaping a major political and cultural symbol. A stirring and revelatory book."—Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University"Spingarn's ambitious volume traces how "Uncle Tom," first seen as a revolutionary exemplar of black dignity and spiritual power, became a potent racial slur....Drawing on her extensive research in digitized archives of periodicals and adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Spingarn unfolds ambivalent responses to the Uncle Tom figure by both white and African Americans....Essential."—M. L. Robertson, CHOICE"[Uncle Tom] demonstrates how careful re-reading of contemporary materials can make us rethink the received interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Spingarn's book is extremely useful for scholars who wish to know how Uncle Tom turned from martyr into traitor and how a new generation of black intellectual leaders reshaped the meaning of an iconic literary character."—Debra J. Rosenthal, Review 19"With crisp prose and a broad array of materials that spans representational forms,Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitoris necessary reading for anyone interested in how the title character of the most influential work of American literature became so much more than, and so very different from, what his creator could have ever imagined."—Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The American Historical ReviewTable of Contents1. A Manly Hero 2. Uncle Tom on the American Stage 3. Uncle Tom and Jim Crow 4. Writing the Old Negro 5. Uncle Toms and New Negroes 6. Writing Off Uncle Tom

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication. Trade Review"Refiguring Speech is a daring and deft new work within Victorian studies as well as colonial and postcolonial theory. Its brilliant, timely argument for retheorizing 'talk' as racially embodied linguistic production represents the next generation of research."—Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside"This book makes a sophisticated argument about the distinction between speech and talk in the late Victorian novel and how, when the propriety of speech gives way to talk, glimpses of an anticolonial aesthetic come into view. Illuminating and eloquent."—Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College"InRefiguring Speech, Wong analyzes four Victorian novels that illustrate a breakdown in the notion of speech as an indication of cultural self-possession and the erosion of the assumption of Ango-European civilization as universal.... Recommended."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker's White Cosmopolitics 3. George Meredith's Profuse Inarticulacy 4. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's Dysfluent End of the World Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.Trade Review"An ambitious essay in the history of ideas—one based on lots of close reading and scrupulous attention to the actual positions in the debates examined." * Paul Hamilton, Queen Mary University of London *"This book stands to be of great value to literary studies, both because of the precision it helps introduce into discussions of literary history—suddenly revealed to be an even looser, baggier monster than even far-reaching projects of distant reading have revealed—and because of the compelling microhistories it unearths within the genealogy of literary studies." * Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University *

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Book SynopsisToward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel’s themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett’s decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett’s determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields’s place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region’s saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others. Jewett’s works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and have garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett’s work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of “companionship” itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.

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Book SynopsisExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making. Trade Review "A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring ‘an ethos of collecting’—and for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."—Scott Herring, Indiana University "This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Liming’s study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."—Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism "It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Liming’s fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."—Los Angeles Review of Books "An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most literary bibliophiles."—ALH Online Review Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex

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