Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books
University of Minnesota Press What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton
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
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Book SynopsisWhy Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsRethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist TurnMeredith FarmerPart I. Ontologies1. Sailing without AhabSteve Mentz2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with WhalesBranka Arsić3. Ahab after Agency Mark D. Noble4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New MaterialismChristian P. Haines Part II. Relations5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch SynesthesiaPilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic PainMichael D. Snediker7.‘The King is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist ReadingRussell Sbriglia8. Approaching Ahab BlindChristopher CastigliaPart III. Politics9. ‘this post-mortemizing of the whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and OldBonnie Honig10.Ahab’s Electromagnetic ConstitutionDonald E. Pease11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of MonomaniaJonathan D. S. Schroeder12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of ReasonJonathan LambPart IV. New Melvilles13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’Matthew A. Taylor 14. Israel Potter; or, the ExcrescenceColin Dayan15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and LaborIvy Wilson16. Melville’s Basement TapesJohn ModernAfterword: Melville Among the MaterialistsSamuel OtterAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex
£80.00
University of Minnesota Press Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Book SynopsisWhy Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsRethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist TurnMeredith FarmerPart I. Ontologies1. Sailing without AhabSteve Mentz2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with WhalesBranka Arsić3. Ahab after Agency Mark D. Noble4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New MaterialismChristian P. Haines Part II. Relations5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch SynesthesiaPilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic PainMichael D. Snediker7.‘The King is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist ReadingRussell Sbriglia8. Approaching Ahab BlindChristopher CastigliaPart III. Politics9. ‘this post-mortemizing of the whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and OldBonnie Honig10.Ahab’s Electromagnetic ConstitutionDonald E. Pease11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of MonomaniaJonathan D. S. Schroeder12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of ReasonJonathan LambPart IV. New Melvilles13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’Matthew A. Taylor 14. Israel Potter; or, the ExcrescenceColin Dayan15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and LaborIvy Wilson16. Melville’s Basement TapesJohn ModernAfterword: Melville Among the MaterialistsSamuel OtterAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a
Book SynopsisReading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human–animal relations From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon.Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.Trade Review"Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation—aesthetic, scientific, and political—dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction."—Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice"Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Capture offers a thought-provoking tour through the ways human-animal relations were reimagined in nineteenth-century America."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition is striking and, one is tempted to say, captivating...a deep, intelligent and well-written study."—Transatlantica"A fascinating genealogy of the representations of nonhuman animals that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century."—Textual PracticeTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A New Animal ConditionPart I. Last Vestiges of the Hunt1. Still Lifes: Audubon2. Land Speculations: CooperPart II. New Genres of Capture3. The Fugitive Animal: Poe4. Fabulous Taxonomy: Hawthorne5. The Stock Image: MuybridgeConclusion: Life in CaptureAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a
Book SynopsisReading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human–animal relations From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon.Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.Trade Review"Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation—aesthetic, scientific, and political—dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction."—Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice"Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Capture offers a thought-provoking tour through the ways human-animal relations were reimagined in nineteenth-century America."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition is striking and, one is tempted to say, captivating...a deep, intelligent and well-written study."—Transatlantica"A fascinating genealogy of the representations of nonhuman animals that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century."—Textual PracticeTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A New Animal ConditionPart I. Last Vestiges of the Hunt1. Still Lifes: Audubon2. Land Speculations: CooperPart II. New Genres of Capture3. The Fugitive Animal: Poe4. Fabulous Taxonomy: Hawthorne5. The Stock Image: MuybridgeConclusion: Life in CaptureAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£20.69
Manchester University Press Byron and Italy
Book SynopsisWinner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.Trade Review‘Byron and Italy is a most welcome contribution in the field which offers fresh approaches on current debates and opens new investigative paths by posing searching, original, and timely questions.’ Maria Schoina , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, The BARS Review, no. 51, Spring 2018 -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction – Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia1 The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20 – Nicholas Halmi2 Byron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians – Gioia Angeletti3 From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish identity in Italy – Jonathan Gross4 The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy – Mauro Pala5 ‘Something I have seen or think it possible to see’: Byron and Italian art in Ravenna – Jane Stabler6 ‘Something sensible to grasp at’: Byron and Italian Catholicism – Bernard Beatty7 The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni – Arnold Anthony Schmidt8 Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement – Peter W. Graham9 This ‘still exhaustless mine’: De Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman lyricism – Alan Rawes10 Playing with history: Byron’s Italian dramas – Mirka Horová11 ‘Where shall I turn me?’ Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan – Diego SagliaIndex
£81.00
Manchester University Press Romantic Women's Life Writing: Reputation and
Book SynopsisThis book explores how the publication of women's life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays, four writers whose names were caught up in debates about the moral and literary respectability of publishing the 'private'. Focusing on gender, genre and authorship, this study examines key works of life writing by and about these women, and the reception of these texts. It argues for the importance of life writing-a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification-in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. The book ultimately constructs a fuller picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century and the role of women writers and their life writing within it. -- .Trade Review'This carefully researched, clearly-written monograph makes an invaluable and original contribution to life studies, to women's writing, and to Romanticism.' Ashley Cross, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies -- .Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1 'Nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman': Frances Burney's Diary (1842-46) and the reputation of women's life writing 2 'A man in love': Revealing the unseen Mary Wollstonecraft 3 'Beyond the power of utterance': Reading the gaps in Mary Robinson's Memoirs (1801) 4 'By a happy genius, I overcame all these troubles': Mary Hays and the struggle for self-representation Coda: Virginia Woolf's Common Reader essays and the legacy of women's life writing Select bibliography Index -- .
£76.50
Manchester University Press Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster's Eternal
Book SynopsisMary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most popular novels in western literature. It has been adapted and re-assembled in countless forms, from Hammer Horror films to young-adult books and bandes dessinées. Beginning with the idea of the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, this edited collection provides a series of creative readings that explore the elaborate intertextual networks that make up the novel’s remarkable afterlife. It broadens the scope of research on Frankenstein while deepening our understanding of a text that, 200 years after its original publication, continues to intrigue and terrify us in new and unexpected ways.Trade Review'...covers an impressively wide range of adaptations of Shelley’s classic and that can only be warmly recommended to anyone interested in Frankenstein, or in adaptation studies in general for that matter.'Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen -- .Table of ContentsIntroductionThe Frankenstein Complex: when the text is more than a text – Dennis Cutchins and Dennis R. PerryPart I: Dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein on stage and radio1 Frankenstein’s spectacular nineteenth-century stage history and legacy – Lissette Lopez Szwydky2 A Frankensteinian model for adaptation studies, or ‘It Lives!’: adaptive symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption, or the fate of Frankenstein – Glenn Jellenik3 The gothic imagination in American sound recordings of Frankenstein – Laurence RawPart II: Cinematic and television adaptations of Frankenstein4 A paranoid parable of adaptation: Forbidden Planet, Frankenstein, and the atomic age – Dennis R. Perry5 The Curse of Frankenstein: Hammer film studios’ reinvention of horror cinema – Morgan C. O’Brien6 The Frankenstein Complex on the small screen: Mary Shelley’s motivic novel as adjacent adaptation – Kyle Bishop7 The new ethics of Frankenstein: responsibility and obedience in I, Robot and X-Men: First Class – Matt Lorenz8 Hammer films and the perfection of the Frankenstein project – Maria K. Bachman and Paul Peterson Part III: Literary adaptations of Frankenstein9 ‘Plainly stitched together’: Frankenstein, neo-Victorian fiction, and the palimpsestuous literary past – Jamie Horrocks10 Frankensteinian re-articulations in Scotland: monstrous marriage, maternity, and the politics of embodiment – Carol Margaret Davison11 Young Frankensteins: graphic children’s texts and the twenty-first-century monster – Jessica Straley12 In his image: the mad scientist remade in the young adult novel – Farran Norris Sands13 The soul of the matter: Frankenstein meets H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ – Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockPart IV: Frankenstein in art, illustrations, and comics: from X-Men to steampunk14 Illustration, adaptation and the development of Frankenstein’s visual lexicon – Kate Newell15 ‘The X-Men meet Frankenstein! “Nuff Said”’: adapting Mary Shelley’s monster in superhero comic books– Joe Darowski16 Expressionism, deformity and abject texture in bande dessinée appropriations of Frankenstein – Véronique Bragard and Catherine ThewissenPart V: New media adaptations of Frankenstein17 Assembling the body/text: Frankenstein in new media – Tully Barnett and Ben Kooyman18 Adaptations of ‘liveness’ in theatrical representations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – Kelly JonesAfterwordFrankenstein’s pulse: an afterword – Richard J. HandIndex
£72.25
Manchester University Press Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster's Eternal
Book SynopsisMary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most popular novels in western literature. It has been adapted and re-assembled in countless forms, from Hammer Horror films to young-adult books and bandes dessinées. Beginning with the idea of the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, this edited collection provides a series of creative readings that explore the elaborate intertextual networks that make up the novel’s remarkable afterlife. It broadens the scope of research on Frankenstein while deepening our understanding of a text that, 200 years after its original publication, continues to intrigue and terrify us in new and unexpected ways.Trade Review'...covers an impressively wide range of adaptations of Shelley’s classic and that can only be warmly recommended to anyone interested in Frankenstein, or in adaptation studies in general for that matter.'Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen -- .Table of ContentsIntroductionThe Frankenstein Complex: when the text is more than a text – Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. PerryPart I: Dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein on stage and radio1 Frankenstein’s spectacular nineteenth-century stage history and legacy – Lissette Lopez Szwydky2 A Frankensteinian model for adaptation studies, or ‘It lives!’: adaptive symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption, or the fate of Frankenstein – Glenn Jellenik3 The gothic imagination in American sound recordings of Frankenstein – Laurence RawPart II: Cinematic and television adaptations of Frankenstein4 A paranoid parable of adaptation: Forbidden Planet, Frankenstein, and the atomic age – Dennis R. Perry5 The Curse of Frankenstein: Hammer film studios’ reinvention of horror cinema – Morgan C. O’Brien6 The Frankenstein Complex on the small screen: Mary Shelley’s motivic novel as adjacent adaptation – Kyle Bishop7 The new ethics of Frankenstein: responsibility and obedience in I, Robot and X-Men: First Class – Matt Lorenz8 Hammer films and the perfection of the Frankenstein project – Maria K. Bachman and Paul C. Peterson Part III: Literary adaptations of Frankenstein9 ‘Plainly stitched together’: Frankenstein, neo-Victorian fiction, and the palimpsestuous literary past – Jamie Horrocks10 Frankensteinian re-articulations in Scotland: monstrous marriage, maternity, and the politics of embodiment – Carol Margaret Davison11 Young Frankensteins: graphic children’s texts and the twenty-first-century monster – Jessica Straley12 In his image: the mad scientist remade in the young adult novel – Farran L. Norris Sands13 The soul of the matter: Frankenstein meets H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ – Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockPart IV: Frankenstein in art, illustrations, and comics14 Illustration, adaptation, and the development of Frankenstein’s visual lexicon – Kate Newell15 ‘The X-Men meet Frankenstein! “Nuff Said”’: adapting Mary Shelley’s monster in superhero comic books – Joe Darowski16 Expressionism, deformity, and abject texture in bande dessinée appropriations of Frankenstein – Véronique Bragard and Catherine ThewissenPart V: New media adaptations of Frankenstein17 Assembling the body/text: Frankenstein in new media – Tully Barnett and Ben Kooyman18 Adaptations of ‘liveness’ in theatrical representations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – Kelly JonesFrankenstein’s pulse: an afterword – Richard J. HandIndex
£23.57
Manchester University Press William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of
Book SynopsisScholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake’s affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake’s gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake’s Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake’s work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake’s bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake’s ‘dark visions of torment’.Trade Review‘These essays investigate how Blake’s major texts—e.g., Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion—arose in conjunction with the Gothic novel in English literature. Addressing a little-recognized facet of Blake studies, the collection examines Blake’s works from aesthetic, architectural, and political Gothic perspectives. A lucid and accessible introduction precedes the essays, which will stretch nonspecialist readers. Several essays focus on Blake’s visual content: David Baulch’s entry reads Gothic iconography in the illustrations of Blake’s Jerusalem, and Jason Whittaker analyzes Blakean references in films by Ridley Scott, with an emphasis on Prometheus. Peter Otto finds the political and social upheavals of Gothic novels to be similarly contained in Blake’s monstrous present with horrified reactions to the alien bodies in The Book of Urizen. Other essays address philosophical readings of Blake’s Deleuzian multiplicity and his counter-Kantian sublime with sophisticated subtlety. This collection is not for the fainthearted, but neither is Blake. Psychological, mythological, and sociological, this collection will draw the reader into the many layers of Blake’s verbal and visual media.’C. L. Bandish, Bluffton University‘William Blake’s Gothic Imagination is more than it promises to be – a ‘major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersections with the Gothic’ – it is a landmark in Blake scholarship. While many of us may be familiar with Blake’s popular reception, reading Blake’s art through the lens of the Gothic is a relatively new and rewarding critical undertaking.’ Sibylle Erle Bishop Grosseteste University, British Association of Romantic Studies‘An ambitious and expansive volume, Bundock and Effinger have opened a new field of enquiry relevant to Blake studies, gothic scholarship, and the broader field of aesthetic theory, particularly as it relates to political power and sexuality. It is to be hoped that their call for further scholarship into the intersection of Blakean verse and gothic horror will not go unanswered.’Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Such uncanny moments of uncomfortable intimacy occur throughout Bundock and Effinger’s collection and point to a fascinating, if sometimes unconscious, self-reflexivity that is not often found in many historicist analyses of Blake’s work.’European Romantic Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction – Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger Part I: The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts1. ‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations – David Baulch2. The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form – Kiel Shaub3. The Gothic sublime – Claire ColebrookPart II: The misbegotten 4. Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – Jason Whittaker5. William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen – Lucy Cogan6. Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection – Stephanie CodsiPart III: Female space and the image7. The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present – Peter Otto8. Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion – Ana Elena González-TreviñoPart IV: Sex, desire, perversion 9. The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence – Mark Lussier10. ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and degeneracy in Blake's Visions and James Graham's celestial bed – Tristanne ConnollyBibliography Index
£81.00
Manchester University Press Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement
Book SynopsisMargaret Harkness is the first book to bring together research on the life and work of a writer, activist and traveller at the forefront of literary innovation and social change at the turn of the twentieth century. Its multidisciplinary approach combines recently uncovered biographical information with rich contextual information to illuminate the extensive career of a writer committed to exposing the exploitation of individuals and the plight of marginalised communities worldwide. The critical essays range from new considerations of Harkness’s well-known novels to examinations of lesser-known periodical fiction and journalism, her relationship with contemporaries such as Olive Schreiner and W. T. Stead, and her life and work abroad in Australia and India. The book gives substance to women’s social engagement and political involvement in a period prior to their formal enfranchisement and enriches understanding of the complex and dynamic world of the long nineteenth century.Table of ContentsChronology of Margaret Harkness’s lifeMargaret Harkness’s connectionsSelected works by Margaret HarknessNote on texts citedIntroduction: Rethinking Margaret Harkness’s Significance in Political and Literary HistoryLisa C. Robertson and Flore JanssenPart I: Harkness’s Life and Work1. A Law unto Herself: the Solitary Odyssey of M. E. HarknessTerry Elkiss2. Absent Character: from Margaret Harkness to John LawTabitha SparksPart II: In Harkness’s London3. Walking Harkness’s LondonNadia Valman4. ‘The Problem of Leisure/What to do for Pleasure’: Women and Leisure Time in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891)Eliza Cubitt5. The Vicissitudes of Victory: Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), and the 1889 Dockworkers’ StrikeDavid GloverPart III: Harkness and Genre: Rethinking Slum Fiction6. Soundscapes of the City in Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1887), Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), and Katharine Buildings, WhitechapelRuth Livesey7. Margaret Harkness, Novelist: Social Semantics and Experiments in FictionLynne Hapgood8. ‘Connie’: Melodrama and Tory-SocialismDeborah MutchPart IV: Personal Influences: Harkness and her Contemporaries9. Socialism, Suffering, and Religious Mystery: Margaret Harkness and Olive SchreinerAngharad Eyre10. Margaret Harkness, W. T. Stead, and the Transatlantic Social Gospel NetworkHelena GoodwynPart V: After London: Harkness’s Life and Work in the Twentieth Century11. Through the Mill: Margaret Harkness on Conjectural History and Utilitarian PhilosophyLisa C. Robertson12. Lasting Ties: Margaret Harkness, the Salvation Army, and A Curate’s Promise (1921)Flore JanssenIndex
£81.00
Manchester University Press Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary
Book SynopsisRichard Marsh was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. His bestselling The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A prolific author within a range of genres including Gothic, crime, humour and romance, Marsh produced stories about shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life. However, while Marsh’s work appealed to a public greedy for sensationalist fiction, both the cultural elite of the day and twentieth-century literary critics looked askance at his popular middlebrow fiction. In the wake of the recent rediscovery of Marsh’s fiction, this essay collection builds on burgeoning scholarly interest in the author. Marsh emerges here as a fascinating writer who helped shape the genres of popular fiction and whose stories offer surprising responses to issues of criminality, gender and empire in this period of cultural transition.Table of Contents1 Introduction – Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna VuohelainenPart I: Richard Marsh and topical discourses of crime2 Tall tales and true: Richard Marsh and late-Victorian journalism – Nick Freeman3 Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender – Johan Höglund4 ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories – Minna VuohelainenPart II: Richard Marsh, masculinity and money5 Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds – Victoria Margree6 ‘The crowd would have it that I was a hero’: populism, New Humour and the male clerk in Marsh’s Sam Briggs adventures – Mackenzie BartlettPart III: Richard Marsh and the imperial Gothic7 ‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt – Ailise Bulfin8 Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess – Neil HultgrenPart IV: Richard Marsh and object relations9 ‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh – Graeme Pedlingham10 Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death – Daniel Orrells11 ‘Something on which you may exercise your ingenuity’: diamonds and curious collectables in the fin-de-siècle fiction of Richard Marsh – Jessica AllsopIndex
£67.50
Manchester University Press That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian
Book SynopsisThat devil’s trick is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siècle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism, That devil’s trick will be an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.Trade Review‘That Devil’s Trick makes a valuable contribution to the history of nineteenth-century mesmerism and medicine. In focussing on the non-medical press, Hughes has greatly expanded our appreciation of both the range and longevity of contemporary debates on mesmerism. In doing so, he presents us with a rich and nuanced history of a pseudoscience that, for all its fluidity, ultimately remained fixed at the fringes of medical respectability.’Karl Bell, University of Portsmouth‘I would thoroughly recommend the book to anyone working in this area since Hughes’s new research method has uncovered a host of original new materials and done a massive job of synthesis. He is to be commended for a serious and weighty volume of research that nuances our understanding of this aspect of nineteenth-century culture.’ Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck, University of London, Victorian Studies (issue 60.1) Autumn 2017 -- .Table of ContentsPreamble: Animal magnetism – a farce1. The epoch of Mesmer 2. Medical magnetism3. Surgical hypnotismConclusion: ‘This is that devil’s trick – hypnotism!’Bibliography Index
£28.47
Manchester University Press From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and
Book SynopsisThis volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson’s visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the chapters not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Vinland on the brain: remembering the Norse – Tim William Machan Part I: Imagination and ideology2 Journeys to the centre of the mind: Iceland in the literary and the professorial imagination – Seth Lerer3 The ‘Viking tower’ in Newport, Rhode Island: fact, fiction, and film – Kevin J. Harty4 Critiquing Columbus with the Vinland sagas – Matthew Scribner5 Vinland and white nationalism – Verena HöfigPart II: Landscapes and cultural memory6 Migration of a North Atlantic seascape: Leif Eiriksson, the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Great Lakes landnám – Amy C. Mulligan7 Norwegian-American ‘missions of education’ and Old Norse literature – Bergur Þorgeirsson8 Americans in Sagaland: Iceland travel books 1854-1914 – Emily Lethbridge9 The good sense to lose America: Vinland as remembered by Icelanders – Simon HalinkPart III: Recasting the past10 Spectral Vikings in nineteenth-century American poetry – Angela Sorby 11 ‘Who is this upstart Hitler?’: Norse gods and American comics during the Second World War – Jón Karl Helgason12 ‘There's no going back’: The Dark Knight and Balder's descent to Hel – Dustin Geeraert13 Old Norse in the New World: the mythology of emigration in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods – Heather O’DonoghueBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children’s Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children’s culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.Trade Review‘Pasts at play makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal learning, revealing how much more we understand about the history of education when we look beyond the school gates.’ Siân Pooley, Victorian Studies -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: pasts at play – Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara GriblingPart I: Biblical and archaeological pasts1 Noah’s Ark-aeology and nineteenth-century children – Melanie Keene2 Bringing Egypt home: children’s encounters with ancient Egypt in the long nineteenth century – Virginia ZimmermanPart II: Classical pasts3 Didactic heroes: masculinity, sexuality and exploration in the Argonaut story of Kingsley’s The Heroes – Helen Lovatt4 ‘Fun from the Classics’: puzzling antiquity in The Boy’s Own Paper – Rachel Bryant DaviesPart III: Medieval and early modern pasts5 Youthful consumption and conservative visions: Robin Hood and Wat Tyler in late Victorian penny periodicals – Stephen Basdeo6 A tale of two ladies? Stuart women as role models for Victorian and Edwardian girls and young women – Rosemary MitchellPart IV: Revived pasts7 Tarry-at-home antiquarians: children’s ‘tour books’ 1740–1840 – M. O. Grenby8 Playing with the past: child consumers, pedagogy and British history games, c. 1780–1850 – Barbara Gribling9 Re-enacting local history in the Stepney Children’s Pageant, 1909 – Ellie ReidAppendix A: A list of 'tour books' – M. O. GrenbyAppendix B: A list of British history-themed toys and games – Barbara GriblingIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in
Book SynopsisWinner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020.Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.Trade ReviewWinner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020. 'Sara Wasson’s Transplantation Gothic is a critical tour de force. Suturing together the medical humanities, contemporary critical theory and insights gleaned from Gothic Studies, the book advances a series of brilliant readings of a broad range of literary and filmic texts, encompassing as it does so such genres and modes as nineteenth-century British Gothic fiction, twentieth-century American horror and postmillennial science fiction and dystopian writing. Resolutely interdisciplinary, it treats fiction and film alongside scientific writing and life writing, offering a truly exhilarating account of the ways in which the Gothic is, at once, critical of, and complicit in, the practice of organ transplantation in modern and contemporary Europe, North America and India. As deeply invested in its subject matter as it is, Transplantation Gothic also articulates, in the end, a political methodology and an ethical praxis that bears important implications for cultural criticism well beyond the immediate field of the Gothic. I have no doubt that this book is destined to become a landmark volume.' Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. ‘…a watershed moment in the history of medical Gothic.’Fantastika Journal'This book provides a necessary and timely intervention into (re)considering the slow violence(s) wrought upon our own bodies and communities.'The Polyphony -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: bodies dis(re)membered: Gothic and the transplant imaginary 1 Clinical necropoetics: medical and ethics writing of death and transplantation 2 The bioemporium: corporate medical horror in late twentieth century American transfer fiction3 Clinical labour and slow violence: transnational harvest horror and racial vulnerability at the turn of the millennium4 Possession? Uncanny assemblage and embodied scripts in tissue recipient horror5 Scalpel and metaphor: ‘machines of social death’ and state sanctioned harvest in dystopian fictionCoda: writing woundsIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist
Book SynopsisMarie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century.It discusses key themes and practices of Duval’s vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read, identifing Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner.The book interrogates the relationships between the practices and the forms of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance.It focuses on the creation of new types of cultural work by women and highlights the style of Duval’s drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity.Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist establishes Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.Trade Review'The multiple authors work together to recover and document Duval’s complex creative life... Together they bring more to their subject than the traditional English literature, art history, and history disciplines that inform most scholarly work on periodicals.'Victorian Periodicals Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction - Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, Julian WaitePart I: Work1 Finding a voice at Judy - Roger Sabin2 Marie Duval and the woman employee - Simon Grennan3 Marie Duval’s theatre career and its impact on her drawings - Julian Waite4 The children’s book author: Queens & Kings and Other Things - Roger Sabin5 Marie Duval and the technologies of periodical publishing - Simon GrennanPart II: Depicting and performing6 The significance of Marie Duval’s drawing style - Simon Grennan7 The relationship between performance and drawing: suggestive synaesthesia in Marie Duval’s work - Julian Waite8 The role of spectacle in Marie Duval’s work - Julian Waite9 A women’s cartoonist? - Roger SabinAppendix 1 Questions of attribution Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, Julian WaiteAppendix 2 Questions of terminology and historicisation Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, Julian WaiteBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Hartly House, Calcutta: Phebe Gibbes
Book SynopsisThis novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.Trade Review‘An entertaining account of Calcutta … These letters indeed are written with a degree of vivacity which renders them very amusing’ Mary Wollstonecraft‘one of the earliest British novels of India of a transcultural love affair between the heroine Sophia Goldborne and a young Brahman. Although positively reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft, as “an animated picture of Eastern manners”, it soon vanished from literary history; only recently has it begun to arouse the interest of students of 18th-century colonial literature … Michael Franklin has done a splendid job editing the novel, with a full introductory essay and explanatory notes, thereby making it available to researchers, students, and the general reader. The republication of Hartly House, Calcutta will add a new dimension to our understanding of 18th-century literature and early British India.’ Nigel Leask, Regius Professor of English, University of Glasgow'The explanatory notes and introduction are both valuable for contextualizing the novel for casual readers, as well as providing pedagogical resources for classroom use.’The Early Modern Women Journal -- .Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsNote on the TextIntroductionHARTLY HOUSE, CALCUTTAVolume IVolume IIVolume IIIExplanatory NotesSelect Bibliography
£25.00
Manchester University Press Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban
Book SynopsisEngine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle’s close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.Table of ContentsIntroductionPart 1. Modernity in motion: Omnibus literature and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris2. Transitory Tales: reading the omnibus repertoire Part II3. Circulation and visibility: Staging class aboard the omnibus4. Moral geographies: Women and public transportEpilogue
£76.50
Manchester University Press Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives
Book SynopsisCharlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë’s legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author’s diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.Trade Review‘To remind oneself of just how provisional even the most "definitive" treatments of Brontë's life and work inevitably turn out to be, you have only to turn to Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives, edited by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Here you will find an account of the dizzyingly varied ways in which scholars and creative practitioners have metabolized Brontë's work in the decades since her death before returning it to the world, transformed.’Kathryn Hughes, TLS January 2018‘The book begins with a scrupulous and detailed account of actual and conjectural pictures of Brontë … I cannot think of another artist whose appearance has received so much attention. What is the difference between the continuing life of works of art and the continuing life of an artist? What difference does it make to that continuing life when the artist is a woman? … Most of the essays in part 1 focus on the “afterlife” part of this collection, and are thoughtful, scholarly, and consistently attentive to what it now means to study a Victorian cult writer in relation to the history of her reception and to contemporary concerns.’Janet Gezari, Connecticut College, Victorian Studies, Volume 61, Number 1, Autumn 2018 -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: picturing Charlotte Brontë – Amber K. Regis and Deborah WynnePart I: Ghostly afterlives: cults, literary tourism and staging the life 1 The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf – Deborah Wynne2 The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration, and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor – Jude Piesse3 Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels – Charlotte Mathieson4 Reading the revenant in Charlotte Brontë’s literary afterlives: charting the path from the ‘silent country’ to the seance – Amber Pouliot5 Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed – Amber K. RegisPart II: Textual legacies: influences and adaptations6 ‘Poetry as I comprehend the word’: Charlotte Brontë’s lyric afterlife – Anna Barton7 The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women’s writing – Emma Liggins8 Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette – Benjamin Poore9 The ethics of appropriation; or, the ‘mere spectre’ of Jane Eyre: Emma Tennant’s Thornfield Hall, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights – Alexandra Lewis10 ‘The insane Creole’: the afterlife of Bertha Mason – Jessica Cox11 Jane Eyre’s transmedia lives – Monika Pietrzak-Franger12 ‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre – Louisa YatesAppendix: Charlotte Brontë's cultural legacy, 1848–2016 – Kimberley BraxtonIndex
£21.00
Manchester University Press Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt
Book SynopsisThis edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the nineteenth-century. It addresses themes such as reanimated mummies, ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary consumer culture across literary modes ranging from burlesque satire to historical novels, stage performances to Gothic fiction and popular culture to the highbrow. The book illuminates unknown sources of historical significance – including the first illustration of an ambulatory mummy – revising current understandings of the works of canonical writers and grounding its analysis firmly in a contemporary context. The contributors demonstrate the extensive range of cultural interest in ancient Egypt that flourished during Victoria’s reign. At the same time, they use ancient Egypt to interrogate ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, notions of race, imperialism, religion, gender and sexuality.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Eleanor Dobson1 Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy – Jasmine Day2 Adam Bede: an ancient Egyptian book of Genesis – Haythem Bastawy3 Remembering Mrs Potiphar: Victorian reclamations of a biblical temptress – Angie Blumberg4 Prefiguring the cross: a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra – Sara Woodward5 ‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt – Molly Youngkin6 ‘A Memnon waiting for the day’: ancient Egypt in aestheticism and decadence – Giles Whiteley7 Perfume, cigarettes and gilded boards: Pharos the Egyptian and consumer culture – Eleanor Dobson8 The intelligibility of the past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars – Luz Elena RamirezIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Chartist Drama
Book SynopsisThe first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘Chartism from Shakespeare’ and Shakespeare from Chartism1 Wat Tyler (1794/1817) – Robert Southey 2 John Frost (1841) – John Watkins3 The Trial of Robert Emmet (1841?)4 St. John’s Eve (1848) – Ernest JonesAppendix 1: Chartist dramatic performancesAppendix 2: Newport sonnetsAppendix 3: Passages omitted in Cleave’s trial version as they appear in Cleave’s source, The Life, Trial and Conversations of Robert Emmet, Esq., Leader of the Irish Insurrection of 1803: Also, the celebrated speech made by him on that occasion (Manchester: John Doherty, 1836).Appendix 4: Advertising placard for a performance of The Trial of Robert EmmettIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and
Book SynopsisSinister histories is the first book to offer a detailed exploration of the Gothic's response to Enlightenment historiography. It uncovers hitherto-neglected relationships between fiction and prominent works of eighteenth-century history, locating the Gothic novel in a range of new interdisciplinary contexts. Drawing on ideas from literary studies, history, politics and philosophy, the book demonstrates the extent to which historical works influenced and shaped Gothic fiction from the 1760s to the early nineteenth century. Through a series of detailed readings of texts from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), this book offers an alternative account of the Gothic's development and a sustained revaluation of the creative legacies of the French Revolution.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: history and the Gothic in the eighteenth century1. Contested pasts: David Hume, Horace Walpole and the emergence of Gothic fiction2. '[B]ringing this deed of darkness to light': representations of the past in Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1778)3. 'Entombed alive': Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783-85), the Gothic and history4. '[E]very nerve thrilled with horror': the French Revolution, the past and Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791)5. 'Things as they are': William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and the perils of the present ReferencesIndex
£21.00
Manchester University Press Byron and Italy
Book SynopsisWinner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.Trade Review‘Byron and Italy is a most welcome contribution in the field which offers fresh approaches on current debates and opens new investigative paths by posing searching, original, and timely questions.’ Maria Schoina , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, The BARS Review, no. 51, Spring 2018 -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction – Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia1 The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20 – Nicholas Halmi2 Byron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians – Gioia Angeletti3 From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish identity in Italy – Jonathan Gross4 The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy – Mauro Pala5 ‘Something I have seen or think it possible to see’: Byron and Italian art in Ravenna – Jane Stabler6 ‘Something sensible to grasp at’: Byron and Italian Catholicism – Bernard Beatty7 The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni – Arnold Anthony Schmidt8 Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement – Peter W. Graham9 This ‘still exhaustless mine’: De Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman lyricism – Alan Rawes10 Playing with history: Byron’s Italian dramas – Mirka Horová11 ‘Where shall I turn me?’ Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan – Diego SagliaIndex
£21.00
Manchester University Press The Dome of Thought: Phrenology and the
Book SynopsisThe dome of thought is the first study of phrenology based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of this important and controversial pseudoscience. With detailed reference to the reports printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the fin de siècle, the book provides an unequalled insight into the Victorian public’s understanding of the techniques, assumptions and implications of defining a person’s character by way of the bumps on their skull. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of phrenology, The dome of thought will prove an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.Table of ContentsPreamble ‘This far-famed skull’: exhumation and the autopsy of talent1 ‘Dr Gall, the anatomist, who gives lectures on the skull’: phrenology in Britain during the first decade of the nineteenth century2 ‘A field for quacks to fatten in’: phrenology in the British Isles3 ‘The doctrines of phrenology shall spread over Britain’: George Combe and the rise of British phrenology4 ‘That strange amalgamation of the two sciences’: mesmerism, celebrity practitioners and the schism of 1842-3Conclusion: The decadence of phrenology: materiality and meaninglessness in modern BritainCoda The phrenology of Donald J. TrumpBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context
Book SynopsisA ground breaking new book that considers all Siddal poems with reference to female and primarily male counterparts, adding substantially to knowledge of her work as a writer, and their shared contemporary concerns. Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats were either known to her or a source of influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which she was associated, and certain of their texts are compared with hers to discuss interplay between erotic and spiritual love, the ballad tradition, nineteenth-century feminism, and the Romantic concept of the conjoined physical and spectral body. Siddal’s artwork is used to introduce each chapter, while other Pre-Raphaelite paintings illuminate the texts and further the inter-disciplinary philosophy of the Brotherhood. This important and stimulating book focuses on the intrinsic merit of Siddal’s poetics whilst advocating a research method that could have multiple applications elsewhere.Trade Review'Woolley robustly engages with Siddal’s strange, intense lyrical ballads...'The Critic'This critical study of Siddal’s life and poetry is hugely significant in our reassessment and re-understanding of Victorian women writers. A voice that has been forgotten and seen as a morbid footnote in the shadow of her husband has emerged as a poetess and artist of the same distinction as her contemporaries and worthy of closer critical attention.'BAVS Newsletter -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: Siddal, Christina Rossetti and the literary context1 Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the duality of love2 Siddal, Swinburne and the ballad tradition3 Siddal, Tennyson, Ruskin and the feminist question4 Siddal, Keats and Pre-Raphaelite relations of powerConclusion: Contextualising Elizabeth Siddal
£76.50
Manchester University Press Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages
Book SynopsisThis book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine.Trade Review'Together, the overall focus on this cultural memory and the rich selection of sources distinguish Machan’s work from others in the field… Given the sheer historical scope of the included material and the comparatively limited space for discussion, Machan’s book does a good job of presenting newcomers with a sceptical and analytical framework of our own for tackling the complicated web of Nordic medievalism.'The Review of English Studies'Machan is one of few scholars to possess the intellectual breadth, depth, and dexterity required to undertake a project of this scope. The results admirably illuminate an English ethnography that, over the course of a millennium, fashioned and refashioned ideas of Scandinavia as a means to shore up the shifting foundations of England’s sense of its own place in the world.'Studies in the Age of Chaucer -- .Table of Contents1 The spectacle of history2 Modern travel, medieval places3 Ethnography and heritage4 An open air museum5 Stories that make things real6 Narrative, memory, meaningIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Ecogothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century:
Book SynopsisEcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through eleven exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.Trade Review'Ferns often represent ‘fascination’, and this is a great way to define my feelings about EcoGothic Gardens: there is much to fascinate in this collection.' Jemma Stewart, The Dark Arts Journal'EcoGothic Gardens convincingly demonstrates that horticultural space was anything but neutral in the nineteenth century [...] This book adds to a growing body of scholarship on Gothic ecologies and is essential reading for anyone working on Victorian horticulture.'Lindsay Wells, Victorian Studies -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers – Sue Edney1 Deadly gardens: The 'Gothic green' in Goethe and Eichendorff – Heather I. Sullivan2 'Diabolic clouds over everything': An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin's garden at Brantwood – Caroline Ikin3 The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination – Joanna Crosby4 Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s 'The Lost Valley' and 'The Transfer' – Christopher M. Scott5 'That which roars further out': Gardens and wilderness in 'The Man who Went too Far' by E. F. Benson and 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' by Algernon Blackwood – Ruth Heholt6 Darwin's plants and Darwin's gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection – Jonathan Smith7 'Tentacular thinking' and the 'abcanny' in Hawthorne's Gothic gardens of masculine egotism – Shelley Saguaro8 Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femme fatales – Teresa Fitzpatrick 9 Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood – Francesca Bihet10 Presence and absence in Tennyson's gardens of grief: 'Mariana', Maud and Somersby – Sue Edney11 Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – Adrian TaitAfterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle – Paul EvansIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press The Case of the Initial Letter: Charles Dickens
Book SynopsisThe book analyses attempts by Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers to challenge established ways of using the distinction between upper and lower case letters, in the interests of a wider radicalism. It discusses Dickens’s satire - on ‘Shares’ in Our Mutual Friend, on Paul Dombey’s position as the ‘Son’ of Dombey and Son - alongside the proto-modernist typography of suffragist poet Augusta Webster and the work of Marx’s translators transforming German conventions of capitalisation into English under the influence of Dickens and Carlyle. Placing these innovations within the history of the dual alphabet from its invention by Carolingian scribes to its rejection by modernist poets and the Bauhaus printers, the book tracks the dual alphabet through Dickens’s manuscripts, corrected proofs, and the ‘prompt copies’ for his public Readings, highlighting distinct ways in which writing, printing and speech produce meaning.Trade Review'The Case of the Initial Letter is fundamentally an effort to redress ‘the failure of literary critics and cultural historians to accord the dual alphabet the attention that it deserves’. With all the authority that upper-casing can muster, this is a Good Book.' Amanda Lastoria, Simon Fraser University, SHARP News 'This study of Dickens’s career and his experiences with capital letters and reader reception extend superbly to the book’s conclusion, which addresses the rise of Modernism.'Textual Cultures -- .Table of Contents1 Introduction: The case of the initial letter2 Typographic leveling in an age of revolution3 The Land of Liberty4 Dombey - and Son – and Daughter5 People, things, and abstractions6 Print capitalism7 Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham8 Writin’large9 PIP and D O C T O R M A R I G O L D10 Dickens, the suffragists and proto-modernismBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Instead of Modernity: The Western Canon and the
Book SynopsisWhen all that was solid melted into air... For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire’s thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history – optical toys from Madrid – sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison.Trade Review'It is is a lavishly illustrated and ambitiously interdisciplinary volume. Ginger’s range of references is impressive, flitting between preserved insects from the Americas and brain images from France. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert sit with Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Augusto Ferrán; Friedrich Nietzsche finds himself in the company of Rosalía de Castro and Juana Manuela Gorriti. London’s Crystal Palace stands alongside José Augustín Arrieta’s mirror paintings... it succeeds admirably in substantiating its conviction that the inclusion of the Hispanic world in narratives of modernism and modernity enables the identification of resonant patterns of cultural production. Distinctiveness thus transforms the appreciation of similarity, rather than being simply eclipsed by it.'Modern Language Review'Instead of Modernity certainly performs an important service by reincorporating the Hispanosphere into modern culture, and by upending simplistic understandings of modernity in turn. The world it portrays is certainly Quixotic, but in the manner stressed by Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard’: as something more fragmentary, more subtle, more incongruous than previously imagined – and ‘infinitely richer’ for it.'Romance, Revolution & Reform'From this new vantage point, both temporality and the concept of modernity are blown out of the water ... [the] broad outlook transcends the limits of what we understand by Hispanism ... and in this quest for the shared and the disruptive, [Ginger] works with pieces of art, turns of language, figures of speech, images from the past and the present, on a surface that as soon opens out to an infinite horizon as it shrinks to a specific time and place.'Jesusa Vega, Anales de Historia del Arte -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: From modernity to the aesthetic appreciation of history1 Meeting: Coming together and taking shape2 Departure: To leap beyond yet nearer bring3 Sacrifice: Everyone must die4 Repose: Forms of shared distractionIndex
£81.00
Manchester University Press Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic
Book SynopsisDrawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens’ illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in nineteenth-century visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.Trade Review'Drawing on graphic traditions of the era, the author describes how Dickens developed objects like dolls and effigies to reinforce meanings beyond the literal. Bove is interested in visual and narrative techniques that move beyond the limits of mimesis.'CHOICE(Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)Spectral Dickens will be of immense interest to those seeking to understand Dickens's enduring appeal for readers and critics alike, especially those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the literary critical paradigms it can enable.' The Dickensian -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: An uncanny ontology of characterisationPart I Spectral mimesis: portraits, caricature, and character1 Mimesis’s ghosts: caricature and anamorphosis2 Spectral character: dreams, distortion, and the (cut of the) realPart II “Moor eeffocish things”: effigy and the bourgeoisie3 Where “the specular becomes the spectral” in The Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son4 Imagos, dolls, and other gazing effigies in Bleak HousePart III Beyond the realism principle: spectral materiality5 Dream as spectral form in Bleak House and the comic surplus of Micawber in David Copperfield6 The “As if” hauntology of Little Dorrit and the uncanny dream of the three fathersBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press The Victorian Aquarium: Literary Discussions on
Book SynopsisThe Victorian aquarium explores the vogue for home tanks that spread through Great Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century. This book offers an example of how the study of a particular object can be used to address a broad spectrum of issues. The Victorian aquarium became in fact a point of intersection between scientific, technological and cultural trends; it engaged with issues of class, gender, nationality and inter-species relations; it drew together home décor and ideals of domesticity, travel and tourism, exciting discoveries in marine biology and tensions between competing views of science; it also marked an important moment in the development of a burgeoning environmental awareness. Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, including aquarium manuals, articles and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium unearths the historical significance of nineteenth-century tanks, reconstructing their far-ranging cultural resonance.Trade Review'This study of Victorian textual sources by Granata (Univ. of Pavia) is only partly about home aquariums. It is also a social history, a study of a different side of Victorian England… This book interestingly documents the rise not only of popular curiosity about science but also of the media-fueled knowledge taken for granted today.'CHOICEReprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The marine aquarium in context2 To the seaside and into the abyss3 Beauty and the fish4 The science of a miniature sea5 Weird creatures in the homeConclusionIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Dante Beyond Influence: Rethinking Reception in
Book SynopsisDante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest (dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours (dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.Table of ContentsIntroduction: What do we talk about when we talk about Dante’s reception?1 Reading Gladstone reading Dante: Marginal annotation as private commentary 2 Ephemeral Dante: Matthew Arnold’s criticism in Victorian periodicals 3 The critic and the scholar: Christina and Maria Francesca Rossetti’s Dante sisterhood4 ‘Everyman’s Dante’: Philip H. Wicksteed and Victorian mass readerships 5 Academic networks: Dante studies in Victorian BritainConclusion: From grande amore to lungo studio: rethinking the hermeneutic turn in reception historyBibliographyIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. Worlding the south examines the dialectics of literary worldedness in ways that recognise inequalities of power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. The collection revises current literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south-south perspectives.Trade Review'...exceptionally rich and critically wide-ranging...'Romance, Revolution and Reform -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: southern worlds, globes, and spheres – Sarah Comyn and Porscha FermanisI World/Globe1 Making, mapping, and unmaking worlds: globes, panoramas, fictions, and oceans – Peter Otto2 Southern doubles: antipodean life as a comparative exercise – Sarah Comyn3 Lag fever, flash men, and late fashionable worlds – Clara Tuite4 Spatial synchronicities: settler emigration, the voyage out, and shipboard literary production – Fariha Shaikh5 Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand: or, get off the beach – Ingrid Horrocks6 Australia to Paraguay: race, class, and poetry in a South American colony – Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O’Neil, and Justin ThompsonII Acculturation/Transculturation7 ‘The renowned Crusoe in the native costume of our adopted country’: reading Robinson Crusoe in colonial New Zealand – Jane Stafford8 The transnational kangaroo hunt – Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver9 ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’: Louisa Atkinson’s recasting of the Australian landscape – Grace Moore10 Mapping the way forward: Thomas Baines on expedition to the coronation of Cetshwayo kaMpande, Zululand, 1873 – Lindy Stiebel11 ‘Wild, desert and lawless countries’: William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa – Matthew Shum12 Short stories of the southern seas: the island as collective in the works of Louis Becke – Jennifer FullerIII Indigenous/Diasporic13 ‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’: wordlists, songs, and knowledge production on the colonial Australian frontier – Anna Johnston14 Kiro’s thoughts about England: an unexpected text in an unexpected place – Michelle Elleray15 Mokena and Macaulay: cultural geographies of poetry in colonial Aotearoa – Nikki Hessell16 Vigilance: petitions, politics, and the African Christian converts of the nineteenth century – Hlonipha Mokoena17 Reading indigeneity in nineteenth-century British Guiana – Manu Samriti Chander18 ‘Some Genuine Chinese Authors’: literary appreciation, comparatism, and universalism in the Straits Chinese Magazine – Porscha FermanisThe south in the world – Elleke BoehmerIndex
£30.00
Manchester University Press The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction
Book SynopsisPenny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan’s longest and most significant people’s movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.Trade Review'This outstanding book paints a different picture of 1830s and 1840s politics as it captures how literature influences history and not just reflects it.'ChoiceReprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library AssociationIt represents a fascinating addition to scholarship on Victorian popular literature and, at times, a genuinely entertaining read which would benefit scholars working on popular fiction, the penny blood, radicalism, and the connection between popular literature and politics.Anna Gasperini, Journal of Victorian CultureThe strengths of Breton’s book are numerous and considerable. They include his skepticism of easy, academically fashionable ideological explanations of cultural phenomena ... Breton vividly demonstrates that popular literature was radical because radicalism appealed to plebeian Victorians. Rebecca Nesvet, Victorian Periodicals Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The Old, New, Borrowed and Blue Newgate Calendar 2 Jack Sheppard, the Newgate Novel 3 Penny Radicalism? Sweeny Todd and the Bloods 4 Mysteries and Ambiguities: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries of London5 Distant Friends of the People: Howitt’s Journal and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling MagazineConclusionIndex
£76.50
Manchester University Press Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban
Book SynopsisEngine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle’s close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.Table of ContentsIntroductionPart 1. Modernity in motion: Omnibus literature and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris2. Transitory Tales: reading the omnibus repertoire Part II3. Circulation and visibility: Staging class aboard the omnibus4. Moral geographies: Women and public transportEpilogue
£21.00
Manchester University Press The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829
Book SynopsisThe gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Countering traditional scholarly views of the ‘rise’ of ‘the gothic novel’ on the one hand, and, on the other, Irish Romantic literature, this study persuasively re-integrates a body of now overlooked works into the history of the literary gothic as it emerged across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1829. Its twinned quantitative and qualitative analysis of neglected Irish texts produces a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period, persuasively positioning Irish works and authors at the centre of a new critical paradigm with which to understand both Irish Romantic and gothic literary production.Trade Review‘Christina Morin’s The gothic novel in Ireland c. 1760–1829 is a significant intervention in the study of Anglo-Irish literature and the gothic tradition. Combining a masterful overview of Romantic era print culture with close readings of hitherto under examined novels, this book suggestively explores the generic interconnectedness between gothic fiction, the national tale and the historical novel. In doing so, it brings to light a much earlier tradition of fiction that emerged from Ireland in the mid-eighteenth century and had a clear impact on the British novelists who followed. As such, The gothic novel in Ireland confidently dispatches long-held views of Irish gothic as a belated phenomenon that emerged in the later nineteenth century. At the same time, Morin delineates acutely the specific conventions and tropes that characterised a distinctively Irish variant of the gothic. Marshalling an impressive range of literary sources, bibliographical evidence and statistical data, Morin provocatively disrupts long-held assumptions about the formative role played by Irish writers at a crucial moment in the history of the novel, making a compelling case for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the literary relationship between Britain and Ireland during the Romantic century.’Anthony Mandal, Professor of Print and Digital Cultures, Cardiff University'In its strikingly original overall approach as well as its illuminating discussions of forgotten or neglected early Irish gothic fictions, The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 greatly broadens and deepens our knowledge of an important but little-known corpus of literature.'European Romantic Review‘When does the gothic novel begin and end? What are its characteristics? And where does Ireland fit in the literary terrain marked out by modern critics? In this valuable exploration, Christina Morin remaps time, place, and content. She argues that by giving sustained attention to Irish gothic literature we can (and should) widen, deepen, and redefine a field whose formal and generic properties have been at once slippery and overly restrictive… Morin carefully dismantles stereotypes and brings fresh eyes to established conventions. She asks probing questions about why some writers fall into neglect—what Franco Moretti dubbed the slaughterhouse of literature—and looks anew at those judged worthy of the attentions of posterity. For students of the period, this will be an essential text: meticulously researched and attractively written.’Eighteenth-Century Fiction -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: locating the Irish gothic novel1. Gothic temporalities: ‘Gothicism’, ‘historicism’, and the overlap of fictional modes from Thomas Leland to Walter Scott2. Gothic genres: romances, novels, and the classifications of Irish Romantic fiction 3. Gothic geographies: the cartographic consciousness of Irish gothicfiction4. Gothic materialities: Regina Maria Roche, the Minerva Press, and the bibliographic spread of Irish gothic fiction Conclusion Appendix 1: A working bibliography of Irish gothic fiction, c. 1760–1829Select bibliographyIndex
£21.00
Manchester University Press Gothic Dreams and Nightmares
Book SynopsisGothic dreams and nightmares is an edited collection on the compelling yet under-theorised subject of Gothic dreams and nightmares ranging across more than two centuries of literature, the visual arts, and twentieth- and twenty-first century visual media. Written by an international group of experts, including leading and lesser-known scholars, it considers its subject in various national, cultural, and socio-historical contexts, engaging with questions of philosophy, morality, rationality, consciousness, and creativity.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Gothic parasomnias and oneirocriticism: the sleep, dreams, and nightmares of Enlightenment reason and beyondCarol Margaret DavisonPart I: Gothic dream and nightmare theory1 The theology of Gothic dreams Sam Hirst2 Morphean space and the metaphysics of nightmare: Gothic theories of dreaming in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s NotebooksKirstin A. Mills3 The devil’s light: Marx, Engels, and diabolic EnlightenmentJayson Althofer and Brian MusgrovePart II: Early classic Gothic dreams and nightmares4 The monsters of prophecy in the Gothic dream, 1764–1818 Richard W. Moore Jr5 Haunted beyond dreams: the Gothic and Enlightenment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction Liz Wan Yuen-YukPart III: Victorian and nineteenth-century European Gothic dreams and nightmares6 Wide awake and dreaming: the night, the haunt, and the female vampireMaria Giakaniki7 Spectral traces: dream manifestation in the Gothic short storyNicola Bowring8 ‘I have seen faces in the dark’: Gothic visions in the Society for Psychical Research’s Census of HallucinationsAlice VernonPart IV: Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Gothic dreams and nightmares: weird fiction, horror film, television, and video games9 Stranger things: nightmarish realities in Thomas Ligotti’s fiction Elisabete Lopes10 Night walking: the oneiric horror cinema Murray Leeder11 Building the Gothic channel: dreams, spectral memories, and temporal disjunctions in The Witcher Lorna Piatti-Farnell12 ‘Lest the night carry on forever’: the transcendent Gothic unconscious in Bloodborne James Aaron GreenIndex
£81.00
Manchester University Press Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious
Book SynopsisCharles Dickens called his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth his ‘best and truest friend’. Georgina saw Dickens as much more than a friend. They lived together for twenty-eight years, during which time their relationship constantly changed. The sister of his wife Catherine, the sharp and witty Georgina moved into the Dickens home aged fifteen. What began as a father–daughter relationship blossomed into a genuine rapport, but their easy relations were fractured when Dickens had a mid-life crisis and determined to rid himself of Catherine. Georgina’s refusal to leave Dickens and his desire for her to remain in his household led to rumours of an affair and even illegitimate children. He left her the equivalent of almost £1 million and all his personal papers in his will. Georgina’s commitment to Dickens was unwavering but it is far from clear what he did to deserve such loyalty. There were several occasions when he misused her in order to protect his public reputation.Why did Georgina betray her once much-loved sister? Why did she fall out with her family and risk her reputation in order to stay with Dickens? And why did the Dickenses’ daughter Katey say it was ‘the greatest mistake ever’ to invite a sister-in-law to live with a family?Trade Review'Essential for anyone interested in Charles Dickens’s personal life. Christine Skelton’s thoroughly researched and brilliantly written book fills in a missing piece of the jigsaw. It makes for enthralling reading.' Jenny Hartley, author of Charles Dickens and the house of fallen women and Charles Dickens: A very short introduction'Georgina Hogarth has been given a voice at last! Christine Skelton has done an admirable job of bringing ‘aunty Georgy” out of the shadow of her celebrity brother-in-law. This is an engaging biography that takes the reader into the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most famous homes.' Lucinda Hawksley, author, biographer, and great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens'A major, and much-needed, contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both the private and the professional life of our greatest novelist.' Professor Michael Slater, author of The Great Charles Dickens Scandal and Dickens and Women -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The Hogarths and Dickens become in-laws 2 Friends and flirting (1836–42)3 Dickens and his ‘little Pet’ (1842–7)4 A ‘lively young damsel’ (1848–51)5 Dickens’s mid-life crisis (1852–7) 6 Loyalty and disloyalty (1857–8)7 ‘Poor Miss Hogarth’ (1858–63)8 ‘His own decision will be the best’ (1864–70)9 ‘A hard, hard trial’ (1870–1917) 10 AftermathIndex
£19.00
Manchester University Press Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 98/1: The
Book SynopsisThis special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is devoted to William Blake. It explores the British and European reception of Blake’s work from the late nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on the counterculture. Opening with two articles by the late Michael Horovitz, an important figure in the ‘Blake Renaissance’ of the 1960s, the issue goes on to investigate the ideological struggle over Blake in the early part of the twentieth century, with particular reference to W. B. Yeats. This is followed by articles on the artistic avant-garde and underground of the 1960s and on Blake’s significance for science fiction authors of the 1970s. The issue closes with an article on the contemporary Belgian art collective maelstrÖm reEvolution.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Douglas Field and Luke Walker The Blake Renaissance – Michael HorovitzWilliam Blake and (a Few of) His Friends in Our Time – Michael Horovitz‘Invisible Gates Would Open’: W. B. Yeats and William Blake in the 1890s – Jodie MarleyWilliam Blake and the Spiritual Forms of Citizenship and Hospitality – Colin TroddAvant-Garde Blake: From Francis Bacon to Oz Magazine – David HopkinsIain Sinclair, William Blake and the Visionary Poetry of the 1960s – James Riley‘The Place Where Contrarieties are Equally True’: Blake and the Science-Fiction Counterculture – Jason WhittakerA Cosmopolitan Case Study: Countercultural Blake in the Therapoetic Practice of maelstrÖm reEvolution – Franca Bellarsi
£31.50
Manchester University Press The Legacy of John Polidori
Book SynopsisThis collection explores the genesis of John Polidori's foundational novella The Vampyre (1819). It then tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first century paranormal romance. -- .
£76.50
Manchester University Press William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of
Book SynopsisScholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake’s affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake’s gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake’s Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake’s work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake’s bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake’s ‘dark visions of torment’.Trade Review‘These essays investigate how Blake’s major texts—e.g., Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion—arose in conjunction with the Gothic novel in English literature. Addressing a little-recognized facet of Blake studies, the collection examines Blake’s works from aesthetic, architectural, and political Gothic perspectives. A lucid and accessible introduction precedes the essays, which will stretch nonspecialist readers. Several essays focus on Blake’s visual content: David Baulch’s entry reads Gothic iconography in the illustrations of Blake’s Jerusalem, and Jason Whittaker analyzes Blakean references in films by Ridley Scott, with an emphasis on Prometheus. Peter Otto finds the political and social upheavals of Gothic novels to be similarly contained in Blake’s monstrous present with horrified reactions to the alien bodies in The Book of Urizen. Other essays address philosophical readings of Blake’s Deleuzian multiplicity and his counter-Kantian sublime with sophisticated subtlety. This collection is not for the fainthearted, but neither is Blake. Psychological, mythological, and sociological, this collection will draw the reader into the many layers of Blake’s verbal and visual media.’C. L. Bandish, Bluffton University‘William Blake’s Gothic Imagination is more than it promises to be – a ‘major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersections with the Gothic’ – it is a landmark in Blake scholarship. While many of us may be familiar with Blake’s popular reception, reading Blake’s art through the lens of the Gothic is a relatively new and rewarding critical undertaking.’ Sibylle Erle Bishop Grosseteste University, British Association of Romantic Studies‘An ambitious and expansive volume, Bundock and Effinger have opened a new field of enquiry relevant to Blake studies, gothic scholarship, and the broader field of aesthetic theory, particularly as it relates to political power and sexuality. It is to be hoped that their call for further scholarship into the intersection of Blakean verse and gothic horror will not go unanswered.’Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Such uncanny moments of uncomfortable intimacy occur throughout Bundock and Effinger’s collection and point to a fascinating, if sometimes unconscious, self-reflexivity that is not often found in many historicist analyses of Blake’s work.’European Romantic Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction – Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger Part I: The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts1. ‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations – David Baulch2. The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form – Kiel Shaub3. The Gothic sublime – Claire ColebrookPart II: The misbegotten 4. Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – Jason Whittaker5. William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen – Lucy Cogan6. Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection – Stephanie CodsiPart III: Female space and the image7. The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present – Peter Otto8. Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion – Ana Elena González-TreviñoPart IV: Sex, desire, perversion 9. The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence – Mark Lussier10. ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and degeneracy in Blake's Visions and James Graham's celestial bed – Tristanne ConnollyBibliography Index
£19.00
Manchester University Press Invasions
Book SynopsisThe first book-length, historical study of invasion-scare and future-war fiction in Britain before and during the First World War in half a century, and the definitive cultural and political history of the genre. -- .
£76.50
Manchester University Press Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in
Book SynopsisWinner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020.Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.Trade ReviewWinner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020. 'Sara Wasson’s Transplantation Gothic is a critical tour de force. Suturing together the medical humanities, contemporary critical theory and insights gleaned from Gothic Studies, the book advances a series of brilliant readings of a broad range of literary and filmic texts, encompassing as it does so such genres and modes as nineteenth-century British Gothic fiction, twentieth-century American horror and postmillennial science fiction and dystopian writing. Resolutely interdisciplinary, it treats fiction and film alongside scientific writing and life writing, offering a truly exhilarating account of the ways in which the Gothic is, at once, critical of, and complicit in, the practice of organ transplantation in modern and contemporary Europe, North America and India. As deeply invested in its subject matter as it is, Transplantation Gothic also articulates, in the end, a political methodology and an ethical praxis that bears important implications for cultural criticism well beyond the immediate field of the Gothic. I have no doubt that this book is destined to become a landmark volume.' Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. ‘…a watershed moment in the history of medical Gothic.’Fantastika Journal'This book provides a necessary and timely intervention into (re)considering the slow violence(s) wrought upon our own bodies and communities.'The Polyphony -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: bodies dis(re)membered: Gothic and the transplant imaginary 1 Clinical necropoetics: medical and ethics writing of death and transplantation 2 The bioemporium: corporate medical horror in late twentieth century American transfer fiction3 Clinical labour and slow violence: transnational harvest horror and racial vulnerability at the turn of the millennium4 Possession? Uncanny assemblage and embodied scripts in tissue recipient horror5 Scalpel and metaphor: ‘machines of social death’ and state sanctioned harvest in dystopian fictionCoda: writing woundsIndex
£19.00
Manchester University Press Creating Character: Theories of Nature and
Book SynopsisThis book explores the ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about personality formation and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others. Innovative readings of seven sensation novels explore how they employ and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, inherent constitution, education, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors. Drawing on material ranging from medical textbooks, to sociological treatises, to popular periodicals, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.Trade Review‘There is much to admire about Ifill's project and its execution. The archival work that grounds it is extensive and thorough. The contexts within which she places these novels are well-chosen and deftly depicted; her study of the theories of mind and personhood to which Braddon and Collins respond amounts to a small intellectual history of its own. Ifill's close readings are careful and attentive.’Marta Figlerowicz is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, Review 19‘The ‘Queen of the Circulating Library’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and her ‘literary father’, Wilkie Collins, conquered the 1860s reading public in Britain and beyond with novels that defined sensation fiction: a genre concerned with ‘current and provocative issues [ … such as] class relations, gender roles, the diagnosis and treatment of insanity, educational reform, and the ethos of self-help’ [offering ] … a convincing account of Braddon and Collins’s engagement with the multifarious notions of character formation in the Victorian period, Ifill’s monograph is a valuable addition to the study of sensation fiction.’James Green, University of Exeter, British Society for Literature and Science‘By drawing on serialized novels as well as many journal articles from the period, Ifill contextualizes the various iterations of determinism found in popular culture and deftly links Collins’s and Braddon’s works to this larger cultural conversation.’Ashton Foley-Schramm, Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2019'I have found Creating Character to be a very interesting read, one which would be a great addition to the bookshelves of its intended audience: those interested in nineteenth-century society and literature. Ifill’s secondary sources are incredibly thorough and may be used as a handy tool for those looking to explore and study sensation fiction and its relationship with science and psychology further.'The Wilkie Collins Journal -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Self-control, willpower and monomania 1. Basil and No Name 2. John Marchmont’s LegacyPart II: Heredity and degeneration3. The Lady Lisle4. ArmadalePart III: Education, environment and circumstance5. Man and Wife6. Lost for Love ConclusionIndex
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Manchester University Press Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children’s Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children’s culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.Trade Review‘Pasts at play makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal learning, revealing how much more we understand about the history of education when we look beyond the school gates.’ Siân Pooley, Victorian Studies -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: pasts at play – Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara GriblingPart I: Biblical and archaeological pasts1 Noah’s Ark-aeology and nineteenth-century children – Melanie Keene2 Bringing Egypt home: children’s encounters with ancient Egypt in the long nineteenth century – Virginia ZimmermanPart II: Classical pasts3 Didactic heroes: masculinity, sexuality and exploration in the Argonaut story of Kingsley’s The Heroes – Helen Lovatt4 ‘Fun from the Classics’: puzzling antiquity in The Boy’s Own Paper – Rachel Bryant DaviesPart III: Medieval and early modern pasts5 Youthful consumption and conservative visions: Robin Hood and Wat Tyler in late Victorian penny periodicals – Stephen Basdeo6 A tale of two ladies? Stuart women as role models for Victorian and Edwardian girls and young women – Rosemary MitchellPart IV: Revived pasts7 Tarry-at-home antiquarians: children’s ‘tour books’ 1740–1840 – M. O. Grenby8 Playing with the past: child consumers, pedagogy and British history games, c. 1780–1850 – Barbara Gribling9 Re-enacting local history in the Stepney Children’s Pageant, 1909 – Ellie ReidAppendix A: A list of 'tour books' – M. O. GrenbyAppendix B: A list of British history-themed toys and games – Barbara GriblingIndex
£19.00
Manchester University Press The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction
Book SynopsisPenny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan’s longest and most significant people’s movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.Trade Review'This outstanding book paints a different picture of 1830s and 1840s politics as it captures how literature influences history and not just reflects it.'ChoiceReprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library AssociationIt represents a fascinating addition to scholarship on Victorian popular literature and, at times, a genuinely entertaining read which would benefit scholars working on popular fiction, the penny blood, radicalism, and the connection between popular literature and politics.Anna Gasperini, Journal of Victorian CultureThe strengths of Breton’s book are numerous and considerable. They include his skepticism of easy, academically fashionable ideological explanations of cultural phenomena ... Breton vividly demonstrates that popular literature was radical because radicalism appealed to plebeian Victorians. Rebecca Nesvet, Victorian Periodicals Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The Old, New, Borrowed and Blue Newgate Calendar 2 Jack Sheppard, the Newgate Novel 3 Penny Radicalism? Sweeny Todd and the Bloods 4 Mysteries and Ambiguities: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries of London5 Distant Friends of the People: Howitt’s Journal and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling MagazineConclusionIndex
£19.00
Manchester University Press Spectral Dickens: The Uncanny Forms of Novelistic
Book SynopsisDrawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens’ illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in nineteenth-century visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.Trade Review'Drawing on graphic traditions of the era, the author describes how Dickens developed objects like dolls and effigies to reinforce meanings beyond the literal. Bove is interested in visual and narrative techniques that move beyond the limits of mimesis.'CHOICE(Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)Spectral Dickens will be of immense interest to those seeking to understand Dickens's enduring appeal for readers and critics alike, especially those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the literary critical paradigms it can enable.' The Dickensian'Bove has produced both a work that expands the ways we think about character, and a sustained demonstration of the continuing value of Lacanian thought for literary analysis.'BAVS newsletterThis is an exciting read for those of us long troubled by the old adage that Dickens is a “failed realist” who does not create convincing characters... a creative and original set of readings of how Dickens’s charactersare so powerful.'Dickens Quarterly -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: An uncanny ontology of characterisationPart I Spectral mimesis: portraits, caricature, and character1 Mimesis’s ghosts: caricature and anamorphosis2 Spectral character: dreams, distortion, and the (cut of the) realPart II “Moor eeffocish things”: effigy and the bourgeoisie3 Where “the specular becomes the spectral” in The Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son4 Imagos, dolls, and other gazing effigies in Bleak HousePart III Beyond the realism principle: spectral materiality5 Dream as spectral form in Bleak House and the comic surplus of Micawber in David Copperfield6 The “As if” hauntology of Little Dorrit and the uncanny dream of the three fathersBibliographyIndex
£23.75