Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books
University of Iowa Press Austentatious: The Evolving World of Jane Austen
Book SynopsisThe amount of fan-generated content about Jane Austen and her novels has long surpassed the author's original canon. Adaptations like Clueless, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Austen's Fight Club, and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries have given Austen fans priceless opportunities to enjoy the classic texts anew, and continue to bring new and younger fans into the fold. Now, through online culture, the amount and type of fan-created works has exponentially multiplied in recent years. Fans write stories, create art, make videos, and craft memes, all in homage to one of the most celebrated authors of all time.This book explores online fan spaces in search of “Janeites” all over the world to discover what fans are making, how fans are sharing their work, and why it matters that so many women and nonbinary individuals find a haven not only in Jane Austen, but also in Jane Austen fandom. In relatable chapters based on firsthand experience, the authors explore how Austen fandom has and continues to build communities around women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. Whether Janeites are shrewdly picking up on the latent sexual tension between women in Emma or casting people of color in leading roles, Luetkenhaus and Weinstein argue that Austen fans are particularly adept at marrying fantasy and feminism.
£30.45
Academic Studies Press Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a
Book SynopsisBreaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova's subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and—by extrapolation—their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.Trade Review"Rylkova’s meticulous study is full of original insights and new interpretations of famous literary works, delivered in a lucid and accessible writing style, with numerous references to primary sources; it is a joy to read. Furthermore, she supplies her readers with a clear road map throughout the book, explaining her next steps and intentions at every turn." - Russian ReviewTable of Contents Acknowledgements Prologue: Breaking Free from Death Part One: Beginnings and Endings 1. Leo Tolstoy and the Privilege of Formidable Hypochondria 2. In Chertkov's Grip 3. Uncle Vanya: The Drama of Sustainability 4. "Homo Sachaliensis": Chekhov's "Character" as a Strategy 5. The Steppe as a Story of Humble and Spectacular Beginnings Part Two: Transcending Death 6. Reading Chekhov through Meyerhold's Eyes 7. Living with Tolstoy and Dying with Chekhov: Ivan Bunin's Liberation of Tolstoy (1937) and About Chekhov (1953) as Two Modes of Auto/Biographical Writing 8. "There is a way out": The Cherry Orchard in the Twenty-First Century 9. A Boring Story: Chekhov's Trip to Germany in 1904 Epilogue: Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev Index
£16.49
Academic Studies Press Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac
Book SynopsisThe focus of this study in comparative criticism is close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication—his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834)—and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, this book focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation of Eugénie Grandet predicts the creation of his own literary characters, themes, and other aspects of his literary output that are now recognized as Dostoevsky’s signature style. It investigates the changes that Dostoevsky made while working on Balzac’s text and analyzes the complex transplantation of Balzac’s imagery, motifs, and character portraiture from Eugénie Grandet into Dostoevsky’s own writing later on.Trade Review“Titus’s scrupulous examination of Dostoevskii’s ‘free’ translation reveals a pattern of departures from Balzac’s original that allow her to argue that these were intentional choices reflective of the translator’s fledgling poetics. … Titus’s study offers an illuminating account of an important moment in Dostoevskii’s creative career and sheds further light on the larger question of, to quote Priscilla Meyer, ‘how the Russians read the French.’”— Anna Schur, Keene State College, Slavic Review“Julia Titus argues that Dostoevsky’s first published work, his ‘free translation’ of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet… ought to be considered among his literary texts. Repeatedly straying from Balzac’s original, Dostoevsky offered Russian readers a narrative that contains many of the themes that later became central in his own literary work. Titus selects three topical and engaging examples in the chapters that constitute the body of her book: female characters, the material world, and money. … [T]his accessible book will appeal to students interested in translation studies, in Dostoevsky’s rapport with Balzac, and in the recurrence in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre of the specific themes outlined here. … Her book will lead readers of Dostoevsky to Balzac (not only to Eugénie Grandet, but also to Le Père Goriot and other texts) and back to read Dostoevsky with a new awareness of some of the first choices that he made in articulating his favorite themes.”— Sara Dickinson, Dostoevsky Studies (2022: Vol. 25)“In Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac, Julia Titus revisits Dostoevskii’s free translation of Eugénie Grandet from a more positive angle. In Dostoevskii’s rewriting of Balzac’s novel she reads the emergence of the Russian author’s own voice. In the first place, she considers the stylistic decisions Dostoevskii made in the interests of rendering the book accessible to a Russian reading public: substituting Russian equivalents for unfamiliar French objects and terms or simply eliminating such details. In the discrepancies between the French original and the Russian translation – as well as in the similarities – Titus further reads indices of Dostoevskian themes and preoccupations that would reappear in the author’s subsequent novels. … Throughout this short book Titus provides insightful commentaries on Dostoevskii’s translations of and indebtedness to Balzac’s original text.”— Sima Godfrey, University of British Columbia, Canadian Slavonic Papers"A free translation or a complete rewrite? Readers of Dostoevsky’s literary debut – his rendering, in 1844, of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet – have often wondered. As Julia Titus suggests, Dostoevsky may have felt emboldened by a tradition in which Russian versions of European poetry sometimes eclipsed their originals… Titus has serious points to make... Titus’s judgements on why Dostoevsky made various alterations are insightful, if at times overly categorical; the extensive quotations she provides, however, allow the reader to draw their own conclusions… As Titus also reveals, the twenty-two-year-old Dostoevsky made a good fist of some difficult passages, despite a lack of dictionaries and reference works. He coped well with ‘various historical coins, their design elements, and other specifics’, adding affectionate and, as time would prove, entirely characteristic suffixes in order to bring M. Grandet’s sensuous love for lucre alive. Young Dostoevsky considered his translation ‘incomparable’ (bespodobnyi). Strictly speaking, he was right.”— Oliver Ready, The Times Literary Supplement“At last, a comprehensive exploration of Dostoevsky's first published work, a translation of Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, and of its relationship to the Russian author's original writing! Julia Titus's detailed and insightful study makes a compelling argument for translation's constitutive role in the author's creative process and represents an important step toward the full integration of translation into literary studies.”— Brian James Baer, author of Translation and the Making of Russian Literature“It is little known that Dostoevsky began his literary career as a translator. His first published book, a Russian translation of Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet, was later superseded by more literal versions. Julia Titus’s meticulous juxtaposition of Balzac’s French original and Dostoevsky’s “free” translation demonstrates how the Russian novelist used strategic deviations from the source text to incorporate Balzac into his own fictional universe. As Titus’s fascinating study shows, Dostoevsky’s appropriations of Balzac’s characters, depictions of the material world, and obsession with the allure of money reverberate through his entire novelistic oeuvre. At the same time, Titus highlights how Dostoevsky distanced himself from Balzac by translating him. This book will be of interest to scholars of Russian and French literature as well as anyone concerned with translation as creative appropriation.”— Adrian Wanner, Liberal Arts Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction Reflections of Eugénie in Dostoevsky’s Female Characters The Material World in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and in Dostoevsky’s Texts The Theme of Money in Eugénie Grandet and Dostoevsky’s Texts ConclusionBibliography
£72.24
OR Books The Manifesto of Herman Melville
Book SynopsisIn this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville’s best- known work is not a novel, does not pretend to be a novel, and was not intended by its author to be read as a novel. Moby Dick is this country’s first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature. The Manifesto of Herman Melville traces the evolution of Moby Dick—from its awful, initial reception, very rapidly passing out of print, to its remarkable revival to become lauded as one of America’s great literary classics. That turnaround happened in the early decades of the 20th century and was, in great part, the result of the new and radical aesthetic movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and cubism that allowed for a radical reading of the book. The novel’s new standing as one of the keystones of the American cannon disguises its deeper meaning as an alarm bell, an obscuring which Barry Sanders, in a critical assessment that is as persuasive as it is provocative, seeks to clear away. Sanders argues that Moby Dick needs to be recognized as Melville''s manifesto: a bold statement warning of the destruction of the natural world made most evident in the book’s central metaphor the relentless pursuit to kill the whale, the first sentient being in Genesis and one of the most startling mammals—possessed of hair and scales, a tail and breasts—and the largest of the creatures on earth, weighing up to 400,000 pounds. Whalers in Melville’s day hunted down and killed these extraordinary behemoths of nature, for their oil, sold to people for cooking and to light their homes. Today the pursuit for energy has shifted dramatically, from sea to land, but the prize remains the same: energy producing fuel for which entrepreneurs and adventurers are prepared to kill off all of nature.
£999.99
Allen & Unwin The Countess from Kirribilli: The mysterious and
Book SynopsisShe was 'amused, cynical, ironic, loving, gay, ferocious, cold, ardent but never gentle'. She was a whirlwind. She created around her the atmosphere of a Court at which her friends were either in disgrace or favour, a butt or a blessing.Elizabeth von Arnim may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen.Her marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness. Her second marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother was a disaster. But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield and other writers such as E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair.Elizabeth von Arnim was an extraordinary woman who lived during glamorous, exciting and changing times that spanned the innocence of Victorian Sydney and finished with the march of Hitler through Europe. Joyce Morgan brings her to vivid and spellbinding life.
£15.29
Atlantic Books The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Book SynopsisA Book of the Year in The Times & Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Spectator, Irish Times and TLS. 'Superb' Daily Mail, 'Book of the Week''Brilliant' The Times, 'Book of the Week''[A] vivid, detailed account' Guardian, 'Book of the Week''Hugely enjoyable' Daily Telegraph'Fascinating' SpectatorCharles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died. Although he specified an unpretentious funeral, it was inevitable that crowds flocked to his open grave in Westminster Abbey. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them.Filled with twists, pathos and unusual characters, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A. N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. Following him from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experiences - a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage.Going beyond standard narrative biography, Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, revealing why his novels have such instantaneous appeal and why they continue to resonate today. He also uncovers the double standards of both the man and his times.Trade ReviewDelightful, riveting... In this superb book, [Wilson] has succeeded in prising open the layers and revealing the inner child inside Charles Dickens. * Daily Mail, 'Book of the Week' *Fascinating... The greatest compliment one could pay this book is to say that it doesn't only read like something written about Dickens; animated by a restless, rummaging critical intelligence, and a curiosity about many of the things others simply take for granted, at times it reads more like something written by Dickens. * Spectator *This is the stylish and outspoken A N Wilson at his provocative best. * 'Books of the Year', Daily Mail *A brilliant denunciation of the sickness of Victorian England.[Wilson] is especially vivid on the moral horror of a self-confident, capitalist society without a safety net for those at the bottom. * The Times, 'Book of the Week' *Hugely enjoyable... A wonderfully fresh and vivid account, fluently integrating life and work, teasingly constructed without being relentlessly chronological, and personally charged by an impassioned gratitude to Dickens... Wilson's unquenchable gusto, sharp critical intelligence and buoyant prose make compelling reading - a vindication not so much of the mystery of Charles Dickens as the miracle. * Daily Telegraph *Wilson's attempt to pin down the Dickens we don't know is energetic. He leads the reader, like one of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, to visit moments in the writer's life... Compelling * Financial Times *A sprightly retelling of a well-known narrative... vivid, detailed. * Guardian, ‘Book of the Week’ *Enthralling... In each section, themes and ideas spool out with Wilson's characteristic fluency and narrative flair. He both loves and is appalled by Dickens * Literary Review *Utterly satisfying... A marvelous exploration by an author steeped in the craft of his subject's elastic, elusive work. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *Beyond the eye-opening analysis, Wilson also offers a moving personal account of why Dickens has meant so much to him * Booklist (starred review) *Charles Dickens had succeeded in lodging all his phobias and foibles within his characters without leaving many traces of his personal life in Tolstoy-like autobiographical confessions. But A. N. Wilson, who three decades ago wrote one of the best biographies of Tolstoy, shows in The Mystery of Charles Dickens that similar demons haunted the nightmarish duality of Dickens's personality as well. * Zinovy Zinik, 'Books of the Year', TLS *Table of Contents1: The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence 2: The Mystery of his childhood 3: The Mystery of the cruel marriage 4: The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens 5: The Mystery of the public readings 6: The Mystery of Edwin Drood 7: The Mystery of Charles Dickens
£11.39
Liverpool University Press Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.Trade ReviewReviews'Illuminating and persuasive, this is a compelling and cohesive study of disability in Victorian fiction.'Dr Ryan Sweet, University of Plymouth'The narratological concept of focalization does double-duty as an optical concept [...] and Hingston’s emphasis on the role of perception in determining bodily normativity or deviance is a welcome approach, expanding our conception of disability outwards from solely a discursive category to a broader perceptual and even phenomenological concept, even in a book fundamentally concerned with textuality. The kind of detailed attention to form - not solely as a textual feature but also a bodily one - in which this book engages is exemplary for future studies of disability in a literary critical context.'Natalie Prizel, Victorian Studies Table of ContentsIntroductionGrotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de ParisSocial Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak HouseSensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The MoonstoneSanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the HouseFairy-tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame PrinceMysterious Bodies: Solving and De-solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle MysteryAfterwordAppendix: FiguresIndex
£98.55
Troubador Publishing Jane Austen's Lost Novel: Its Importance for
Book SynopsisUntil the appearance in 1870 of the Memoir written by her nephew J.E. Austen Leigh, very little was known about Jane Austen beyond what could be deduced from her major novels. This had been the family’s choice. Despite this lack of information Deidre Le Faye records that following the acceptance of Jane’s novel Susan for publication in 1803, “according to family tradition, she had composed the plot of another full-length novel”. This, Two Girls of Eighteen, never previously identified as Jane’s, was published in 1806 but at some point apparently suppressed. Only two copies are known to exist - one in the Deutsch Nationalbibliothek and the one from which the present text has been transcribed, which came from a house that Jane knew and is mentioned by her in A Collection of Letters. Two Girls of Eighteen has a divided structure, involving two sisters, Charlotte and Julia, each of whom is given her own story, the one a Romance partly based on Richardson’s Clarissa, the other a Gothic confection - both set in contemporary England. Jane appears to be testing in this the capabilities of such forms for expressing what she was trying to achieve. Through the character of Charlotte, who is attempting to write a novel, she deliberates at length the sort of thing that she herself might write. Her reflections on such subjects as medicine, law, the rights of women, etc take us below the glossy surface of the major novels and show us the complex web of thought that lies beneath.
£11.69
Verso Books Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse
Book Synopsis"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people in it."In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn"-are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life-of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet-as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.The book emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry; but more, it "is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses-and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's enduring work.Trade ReviewIn Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, red life streams again through Keats's poems. It is a risky, passionate criticism that - in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing - tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry. A brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book -- Ben Lerner * Paris Review *Keats's Odes is brash, skeptical, and tender by turns, offering a fluctuating re-visioning of Keats which is firm in its convictions...Nersessian's prose is bold, irreverent, declarative, and feral. Hyperbole and slackness are deceptive: every phrase feels carefully pitched. * Times Literary Supplement *The book's intimacy, vulnerability and determination to provoke is true to Keats, and Nersessian's genuine feeling for his work is never in doubt. One can't help but be pleased that two centuries on, Keats's odes still inspire engagement and love. * Washington Post *This book claims to be 'about' Keats's odes. And it is. But it is also about beauty and sadness and love and revolution and how the odes can help us to better understand these things. It is nothing short of a perfect book, one that understands how poetry can transform one's life. Nersessian is on track to be the Harold Bloom of her generation, but a Bloom with politics. -- Juliana SpahrThis is an intense, often dazzling, original, illuminating, idiosyncratic, but also welcoming and welcome book. Offering trenchant, astute, often polemical and sometimes breathtaking readings of Keats's Odes - and simultaneously of love, politics, worldmaking, and self - Nersessian has written a propelled, impelled, impassioned work, truly in Keats's spirit. -- Maureen N. McLaneThe best book about John Keats published at the poet's bicentenary. * Jacobin *I've read Anahid Nersessian's KEATS ODES: A LOVER'S DISCOURSE a half dozen times now, and it just keeps getting better. Nobody's smarter than Nersessian, nobody's more humane, nobody's more searching, fearless, nobody's more provocative, nobody challenges and cherishes their subject this way. It is that thrilling sensation of meeting a new voice on the page you know you'll spend your entire life following. -- Kaveh AkbarAnahid Nersessian offers a radical and unforgettable reading of the British writer's odes-one that upends our sense of his poetic project. * The Nation *Intense emotion abounds in this literary blend of analysis and autobiography. . . . In six essays that examine each of Keats's Great Odes, Nersessian tells a 'kind of love story' between herself and the poems. * Publishers Weekly *Thinking through John Keats's six "Great Odes," Nersessian offers up six critical and autobiographical essays that work, in their own right, like odes. Keats's Odes is also a terse, stunning pastiche of Roland Barthes's "A Lover's Discourse". In imaginative, lucid prose, Nersessian proves that criticism can be loving, literary art. * Boston Globe, Best Books of 2021 *Keats's Odes is a discourse on love as interpretive practice. Demanding, generous, precise, utopian, and unfailingly brilliant, Nersessian reinvents reading itself as a form of critical intimacy for our broken times -- Srikanth ReddyThis book is a classic of a new genre, a love letter of literary theory, giving a desired political language to the left's long-quivering heart for the lyric and sensuous knowledge of Keats. We always knew he was the activist's Romantic, and now in articulate and radical analysis, we have an understanding of his poetic form that illuminates our unwavering passion for his Odes. -- Holly Pester
£12.34
University of Wales Press Theological Monsters
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£71.25
V & A Publishing Alice, Curiouser and Curiouser
Book SynopsisLewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is a cultural phenomenon. First published in 1865, it has never been out of print and has been translated into 170 languages. But why does it have such enduring and universal appeal for both adults and children? Beginning by plunging the reader into the spectacular new wonderland of acclaimed illustrator Kristjana S. Williams, Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser goes on to explore how Lewis Carroll's celebrated Alice books have fuelled creative minds for over 150 Years. This unique publication takes us on a journey whose scope ranges from art, literature, theatre and film through science and technology to fashion and politics, encouraging us to ask whether we should all try to be more like Alice.Trade Review'As Alice herself once said: "what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" This book provides plenty of the former while encouraging, I'm sure, much of the latter.' -- - - Antonino Tati, Cream Magazine, October 2020 'This playful and visually stunning tome investigates the Alice phenomenon and includes dreamy illustrations and quotes from a host of aficionados...' -- - - Australian Women's Weekly 'a rich accompanying coffee table book' -- - - Tianwei Zhang, WWD, May 19 2021 'full of riches' -- - - Claire Allfree, The Telegraph, 18th May 2021 'deserve[s] to be on anyone's bookshelf'-- - - Michael Glover, The Tablet, 15th September 2021Table of ContentsForeword, Tristram Hunt - Introduction, Kate Bailey and Simon Sladen - Wonderland, Kristjana S. Williams - Creating Alice, Annemarie Bilclough - Performing Alice, Simon Sladen - Reimagining Alice, Kate Bailey - Being Alice, Harriet Reed
£29.75
Anthem Press The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In the
Book SynopsisFrances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.Trade Review“Recchio’s book on Frances Hodgson Burnett is an excellent example of a popular woman writer reclaimed in the twenty-first century for her generically varied, financially successful and still relevant fiction. This book is a must for anyone interested in women’s writing, Victorian to modernist literary developments and First World War writing.” —Janine Hatter, Programme Manager, PGTS, Doctoral College, University of Hull, UKWith this literary reclamation of Burnett's novels, Thomas Recchio has made a significant contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies, persuasively arguing for the recognition of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a serious writer. One way in which The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett develops its in-depth analysis is by exploring intersecting threads of Burnett's life and career, thereby offering rich contexts in which to highlight her craft. - Ruth Y. Jenkins, The Lion and the Unicorn, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 213-215.Recchio offers detailed readings of most of Burnett’s fourteen adult novels (by his count), which he organizes into five roughly chronological clusters grouped by genre and topic. […] This book amply documents Burnett’s prolific work as a novelist for adults, her engagements with and influence on literary traditions in two countries and two centuries, and the rewards of reading her fiction more widely and critically —Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell; Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady; Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom; Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin; Bibliography; Index.
£29.34
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century
Book SynopsisA survey of the rituals of the year in Victorian England, showing the influence of the Middle Ages. What does a maypole represent? Why eat hot cross buns? Did Dick Whittington have a cat? All these questions are related to a larger one that nineteenth-century Britons asked themselves: which was more fun: living in their own time, or living in the Middle Ages? While Britain was becoming the most industrially-advanced nation in the world, many vaunted the superiority of the present to the past-yet others felt that if shadows of past ways of life haunted the present, they were friendly ghosts. This book explores such ghosts and how real or imagined remnants of medieval celebration in a variety of forms created a cultural idea of the Middle Ages. As Britons found, or thought that they found, traces of the medieval in traditions tied to times of the year, medievalism became not only the justification but also the inspiration for community festivity, from Christmas and Boxing Day through Maytime rituals to Hallowe'en, as show in the writings of amongst many others Keats, Browning and Dickens.Trade Review[The] book is awash with fascinating and understudied examples of nineteenth-century medievalism, and is thus a valuable work of scholarly recovery and a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting read. -- PARERGON[An] interesting and very relevant contribution to any study of invented medievalisms. -- FOLKLORETable of ContentsIntroduction: Medievalizing Time 1. The Christian and Not-so-Christian Year 2. Medievalist Calendar Experiments 3. Christmas Becomes a Season 4. Winter Love: St. Agnes and St. Valentine 5. Rites of Spring: Imagining Origins 6. Summer Festivals: Religion in Performance 7. Fragmented Autumn: Harvest-Home to Lord Mayor's Show Epilogue: Christmas Ghosts
£18.74
Alma Books Ltd Lyrics: Volume 4 (1829-37)
Book SynopsisThe founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works of Alexander Pushkin, collects the poems written by Pushkin at the time of his marriage to Natalia Goncharova right until his untimely death in a duel, and includes some of the greatest lyrical poems of his maturity, such as `In an Album', `Arab Imitation' and `Worldweariness', each presented in a verse translation opposite the original Russian text. Enriched with notes, pictures and an appendix on Pushkin's life and works, this will be essential reading for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the Russian bard's genius.Trade ReviewPushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps the only phenomenon of the Russian spirit. -- Nikolai Gogol
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd After Lermontov
Book SynopsisMikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known to Anglophone readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.
£11.66
The Gresham Publishing Co. Ltd Wuthering Heights
Book SynopsisEmily Bronte tells the story of the ill-fated love of Catherine Earnshaw for the dark and brooding Heathcliff. It is the full text, with an introduction, notes on the author, Notes on characters, story outline and themes. The book also includes exam questions. It is ideal for students.
£5.99
Everyman Plays, Prose Writings And Poems
Book SynopsisFamed as a wit and bon viveur, Oscar Wilde lived up to his reputation. This selection of plays, poems and prose writings, introduced by Terry Eagleton, includes "The Importance of Being Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Critic as an Artist", Apologia", "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism", "Letter to Robert Ross", "Requiescat" and "The Ballad of Reading Goal". Terry Eagleton is the author of "Criticism and Ideology", "Marxism and Literary Criticsm" and "Literary Theory: An Introduction".
£14.24
NMSE - Publishing Ltd Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind
Book Synopsis'For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door And Leerie stops to light it, as he lights so many more...' The picture of a small boy peering from a window at dusk to watch the lamplighter in the street is one of the enduring images of 19th-century Edinburgh, and the child probably the most famous ever brought up there. Robert Louis Stevenson loved to conjure up a dashing, romantic lineage for himself, dreaming that he was descended from the colourful outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. The reality was less flamboyant but no less remarkable and he would learn that the street lamps of Edinburgh owed their brilliance to the scientific work of his own great-grandfather. This welcome addition to the Robert Louis Stevenson canon gives a concise account of his life - his family background, childhood and adolescence in a Calvinist, hard-working household in Scotland, his travels in three continents and his final years in the South Seas.It examines his relationships with his parents and his nurse, with English and American friends, particularly the family into which he married, and with the Samoan islanders among whom he died at the age of 44. Stevenson's childhood experiences and Scottish identity fed his fertile imagination wherever he found himself. His legacy includes travel writing, essays and poetry, and novels such as "Treasure Island", "Kidnapped", "The Master of Ballantrae", "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", "St Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston", still read and enjoyed more than one hundred years after his death. "Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind" is an insightful introduction to the life and work of one of the world's best-loved writers.Trade Review' ... it seems we still have to remind ourselves how wonderful a writer Stevenson was. Dunlop's new biography does the honours with appealing brevity and elegance.' The Scotsman A concise, well-written chronological narrative of Stevenson's life, which, though it makes no new contribution to our knowledge, tells the story well and offers convincing interpretations of key moments (quarrels with father and Henley, family relations on Samoa.' ... Professor Richard Drury, RLS website ' ... a stimulating text, particularly useful for young scholars and those interested in learning more about Stevenson. Dunlop's enthusiasm about her subject will certainly encourage readers to revisit Stevenson's writings and to investigate further into his life.' Journal of Stevenson StudiesTable of ContentsThe Engineer's ChildThe Cummy YearsThe Education of a WriterWork ExperienceIn Two WorldsNorth and SouthThe Pains of LoveR.L. Stevenson, AdvocateBeside the StoveThe Travelling MindFamiliesSkerryvoreBreaking CirclesIn the South SeasA Laird in SamoaThe Myth of Robert Louis StevensonPostscriptSelect BibliographyIndex
£6.78
CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD The Connell Guide To Charles Dickens's Great
Book SynopsisGreat Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”. Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.
£8.54
CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD The Connell Guide To Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Book SynopsisConrad finished Heart of Darkness on 9th February, 1899 and on publication it had an impact as powerful as any long short story, or short novel ever written – it is only 38,000 words. It quickly became, and has remained, Conrad’s most famous work and has been regarded by many in America, if not elsewhere, as his greatest work. Exciting and profound, lucid and bewildering, and written with an exuberance which sometimes seems at odds with its subject matter, it has influenced writers as diverse as T.S.Eliot, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It has also inspired, among others, Orson Welles, who made two radio versions the second of which, in 1945, depicted Kurtz as a forerunner of Adolf Hitler, and Francis Ford Coppola who turned it into the film Apocalypse Now. More critical attention has probably been paid to it, per word, than to any other modern prose work. It has also become a text about which, as the late Frank Kermode once complained, interpreters feel licensed to say absolutely anything. Why? What is it about Heart of Darkness that has captivated critics and readers for so long and caused so many millions of words to be written about it? And why has its peculiarly dark and intense vision of life so frequently been misunderstood? Graham Bradshaw provides the answers in this illuminating guide.
£8.54
CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD The Connell Guide To Thomas Hardy's Tess of the
Book Synopsis
£8.54
CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD The Connell Guide To Jane Austen's Emma
Book Synopsis“A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like,” the author famously proclaimed. In fact, in any league of likeability Miss Woodhouse is streets ahead of Miss Fanny – the ostentatiously “meek” heroine of Mansfield Park. Meek Emma is not. Indeed it is her sense of absolute sovereignty over her little world of Highbury – her right, as she presumes, to dispose of the marriage choices of those in her circle – which brings her to grief. And that grief, by the familiar course of the heroine’s moral education in Austen’s fiction, makes her, through remorse and repentance, a mature woman capable of forming correct judgements. Not least about whom Miss Woodhouse herself will marry. Emma, of all the six great novels, is the one which conforms most closely to Austen’s famous formula that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”. Emma is, by general agreement, the “quietest” of the novels. Some have complained that there is not enough of a story in it, but others, as this guide shows, have found the plot in Emma the most successful Austen achieved. It is, for example, unusual among the sextet in playing a cunning trick on the reader who – unless they are sharp (sharper certainly than Miss Woodhouse) – may well be deluded as to which eligible young (or less than young) man the heroine will end up spending the rest of her life with. Or whether, given her frequently uttered distaste for marriage, she will end up the only unwed of the six heroines at the end of it all.
£8.54
CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD The Connell Guide To Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
Book SynopsisJane Eyre, published on 16th October 1847, was an instant popular success. More than 150 years later, it still powerfully affects its readers with all the charge of a new-minted work. It is easy to forget, now, how shocking it was to its mid-19th century readers. Virtually every early reviewer felt obliged either to condemn or defend its impropriety. As Josie Billington reminds us in this compelling guide, the most savage reviews denounced the “coarseness” of language, the “unfeminine” laxity of moral tone, and the “dereliction of decorum” which made its hero cruel, brutal, yet attractively interesting, while permitting its plain, poor, single heroine to live under same roof as the man she loved. What caused most outrage, perhaps, was the demonstrable rebellious anger in the heroine’s “unregenerate and undisciplined spirit”, her being a passionate law unto herself. “Never was there a better hater. Every page burns with moral Jacobinism,” wrote an early critic. As the poet Matthew Arnold was to say of Brontë’s “disagreeable” final novel, Villette, “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage”. In this book Josie Billington looks at the passion and indeed rage which filled Bronte, and shows us that, though sometimes criticised for melodrama, this is a novel of great intellectual seriousness, moral integrity and depth of feeling. She quotes George Henry Lewis: “It is soul speaking to soul; it is an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit.
£8.54
Association for Scottish Literary Studies The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century
Book SynopsisThe nineteenth century has been regarded as an era of decline for Scottish literature. This INTERNATIONAL COMPANION shows that it was instead a transformational period. Through a lively and extensive publishing community, widely varied Scottish writers found expression. New voices and genres flourished. Alongside cultural giants such as Scott and Stevenson, women, working-class, immigrant, and emigrant authors writing in English, Gaelic, and Scots propelled Scotland onto the international literary stage. From Shetland to Tasmania, from Celtic Twilight to science fiction, this volume explores the many modes of Scottish expression that emerged from this complex and fertile age.
£22.46
NMSE - Publishing Ltd Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland
Book SynopsisDramatic Highland landscapes, heroic histories, tartan and bagpipes are among the defining images of Scotland for many people around the world. From the Romantic movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries to Queen Victoria’s Highland idyll at Balmoral, Wild and Majestic considers the origins of these ideas and explores how romantic interpretations of the cultural traditions of the Scottish Highlands and Islands became enduring symbols of wider Scottish identity. This book accompanied a landmark exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in 2019. It charts Scotland’s journey into the global imagination and invites you to think again about the meaning and relevance of ideas that continue to define Scotland today.Trade Review' … beautifully produced and magnificently illustrated … it is also a book that tells its story very well indeed.' Undiscovered ScotlandTable of ContentsRomantic visions of Scotland Symbols of Scotland Scotland after Culloden A romantic vision of Scotland Royal favour A tour of Scotland The Gothic revival The Highland idea Legacy Acknowledgements Further reading
£6.79
NMSE - Publishing Ltd Scottish Women Writers: from 1800 to the Great
Book SynopsisThis illuminating book traces the development of Scottish women’s writing in English from its genesis in the late eighteenth century to its flowering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hindered initially by the hostility of the Presbyterian Church and the self-serving attitude of the male hierarchy which denied them a proper education, an astonishing number of women found opportunities, in the midst of domestic obligations, to write, and often publish – novels, poetry, diaries, journalism, letters, essays and reportage. Charlotte Waldie and Christina Keith visited, respectively, Waterloo and Flanders in the immediate aftermath of battle. Another intrepid writer, Emily Graves, wrote a memoir of her travels in Transylvania in The Light Beyond the Forest – from which Bram Stoker directly lifted the most blood-curdling elements of Dracula. Others remembered include literary multi-tasker and businesswoman Christian Isabel Johnstone; playwright Joanna Baillie; working-class poets Marion Bernstein and Janet Hamilton; novelist Susan Ferrier; memoirist Anne Grant of Laggan; and writer and scientist Mary Somerville, depicted on the cover, after whom Somerville College, Oxford is named. Trade Review'Any open-minded reader will learn a lot from this survey of Scottish women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries.' Stuart Kelly in Scotland on SundayTable of ContentsBefore Fiction / Calvin’s Shadow / The Author of Marriage / Multitasking / A General Utility Woman / A Chelsea Interior / The Good Wife / Two Poets of the West / The Rainbow in the Cloud / The Highland Lady / The Immortal Joanna / Telling My Story / The Most Extraordinary Woman / Waterloo and Other Stories / Golden Lands / Turning the Century / My Own Country / Postscript
£14.24
Saraband Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A view from the 21st
Book SynopsisEverybody knows Charlotte Brontë. World-famous for her novel Jane Eyre, she’s a giant of literature and has been written about in reverential tones in scores of textbooks over the years. But what do we really know about Charlotte? As the famous siblings celebrate their bicentenaries, Charlotte Brontë Revisited looks at Charlotte through 21st-century eyes. Discover the real Charlotte: her private world of convention, rebellion and imagination, and how they shaped her life and writing – including the paranormal, nature, feminism and politics. It’s an indispensable guide for students and literature lovers, and emphatically shows why Charlotte is as relevant today as she ever was.Trade Review`Interweaves biography and reference to scholarly material with [Franklin’s] own take on pertinent aspects of Charlotte’s oeuvre ... [Her] witty tone makes the calibration of these two things — the pleasure of the literary enthusiastic and the scholarly — both easy and enjoyable. Franklin deftly mixes contemporary humour with reflectivity ... superbly written, exuberant.’ Brontë Studies Journal
£9.49
Macat International Limited An Analysis of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance
Book SynopsisWhat is a self? Greenblatt argues that the 16th century saw the awakening of modern self-consciousness, the ability to fashion an identity out of the culture and politics of one’s society. In a series of brilliant readings, Greenblatt shows how identity is constructed in the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and other Renaissance writers. A classic piece of literary criticism, and the origins of the New Historicist school of thought, Renaissance Self-Fashioning remains a critical and challenging text for readers of Renaissance literature.Table of ContentsWays in to the Text Who was Stephen Greenblatt? What does Renaissance Self-Fashioning Say? Why does Renaissance Self-Fashioning Matter? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited
£8.58
Temple Lodge Publishing Friedrich Schiller and the Future of Freedom:
Book Synopsis‘The primary task of this book is to build a bridge to a deeper understanding of Schiller himself who, along with Goethe and Novalis, was one of the great spiritual forerunners and trailblazers of anthroposophy.’ – Sergei O. Prokofieff --- Planned as the second volume in a trilogy on Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and the Future of Freedom is much more than a conventional biography. Prokofieff shines new light on Schiller’s character and destiny, helping to establish his position as a crucial antecedent to Rudolf Steiner in the spiritual history of humanity. He also defines Schiller’s task in the context of the achievements of Goethe and Novalis at the end of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary period that saw a seminal transformation in the philosophical and artistic landscape. --- Following the recent publication of The Riddle of Dmitri – which explores Schiller’s unfinished drama Demetrius – Prokofieff returns here to the theme in the framework of Schiller’s life and extensive body of work. In timely fashion, he conveys Schiller’s mediating role between Central and Eastern Europe, indicating how he came ‘near to the soul of the Russian people through an idealism imbued with his entirely self-created moral power and his fiery enthusiasm for everything in the world that is true, beautiful and good’.Table of ContentsPreface – I. Schiller’s Spiritual Task between Goethe and Novalis – II. Friedrich Schiller and the Future of Freedom – 1. The Ideal of Freedom and Its Spiritual Origin – 2. The Battle for Human Freedom – 3. Schiller’s Premature Death and its Spiritual–Historical Consequences – III. Friedrich Schiller’s Demetrius Fragment as a Drama of the Human I – Addendum to Part III: On the Figure of Mikhail Romanov – In Place of an Epilogue: ‘Goethe’s Science according to Schiller’s Method’ – Appendix – 1. Examples for the Relationship between the Aesthetic Letters and The Philosophy of Freedom – 2. Schiller on the ‘Fall of Man’ and Freedom – 3. Evidence of Schiller’s Spiritual Character in his Own Work – Novalis on Friedrich Schiller – Rudolf Steiner: Excerpt from the Lecture of 18 December 1920 – Rudolf Steiner: ‘Friedrich Schiller’ – References and Notes – Bibliography of Works by Rudolf Steiner
£22.50
White Star Pride And Prejudice
Book SynopsisA new series of activity books designed for avid readers who love the classics of literature. Devote page-after-page to engaging and stimulating mental and practical activities, for hours of leisurely entertainment retracing the events of your favourite novel and its beloved characters. Fun knowledge or aptitude tests; calligraphy exercises; paperwork; drawings to complete; multiple choice riddles; party games; puzzles and so much more. First editions in the Novel Escapades series include Pride and Prejudice and Sherlock Holmes ISBN 9788854420441. Bonus material includes specific insights into the themes, setting, and characters of each novel, as well as relevant cooking recipes that tie in with the plot.
£12.34
Broadview Press Ltd Aurora Floyd
Book SynopsisAurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel.”The novel depicts a heroine trapped in an abusive and adulterous marriage, and effectively dramatizes the extra-legal pressures which kept many such unhappy marriages out of the courts: fear of personal scandal, and of betraying one’s family through the publicity and expense of the process. Aurora’s bigamous marriage dramatizes the need for expeditious divorce without the enormous social cost, but the overt sexuality of the heroine shocked contemporary critics. “What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshy and unlovely record,” wrote Margaret Oliphant.Braddon’s text is studded with references to contemporary events (the Crimean War, the Divorce Act of 1857) and the text has been carefully annotated for modern readers in this edition, which also includes a range of documents designed to help set the text in context.Trade Review“This is the only modern edition to be based on the first three-volume version of Braddon’s much revised novel, and the editors make an excellent case for their choice. A substantial and lucidly written critical introduction situates the novel in its contemporary cultural contexts; in debates about realism and sensationalism, and anxieties about class, femininity, domesticity and marriage. The appendices, containing a selection of contemporary views of femininity and domesticity, and responses to Braddon and her novel, are an added bonus to this excellent volume.” — Lyn Pykett, University of Wales-Aberystwyth“Invaluable … provides copious explanatory notes, appendices containing contemporary reviews and writings on femininity, and a thorough, well-organized introduction.” — Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionA Note on the TextMary Elizabeth Braddon: A Brief ChronologyAurora FloydAppendix A: Victorian Femininity: The Stable, the Home, and the Fast Young Lady “Fast Young Ladies” (Punch) “Six Reasons Why Ladies Should Not Hunt” (The Field) “Muscular Education” (Temple Bar) John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens” (Sesame and Lilies) (1865) Appendix B: Reviews and Responses H.L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels” (Quarterly Review) “The Archbishop of York on Works of Fiction” (The Times) W. Fraser Rae, “Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon” (North British Review) Henry James, “Miss Braddon” (The Nation) Margaret Oliphant, “Novels” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) George Augustus Sala, “The Cant of Modern Criticism” (Belgravia) George Augustus Sala, “On the ‘Sensational’ in Literature and Art” (Belgravia) “Sensation Novels” (Punch) Select Bibliography
£26.06
Broadview Press Ltd The Invisible Man
Book SynopsisThe Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, in literature. A thoroughly unlikeable character, the Invisible Man is defined by his arrogance, impulsiveness, rudeness, and, at times, violence. He is, however, a man of great genius; but, his genius is selfish—no one profits from his experiments, not even himself. The Invisible Man is not only a commentary on imagination and the great spirit of invention that elevated the nineteenth century but also a warning against the eugenic and self-interested policies that threatened the twentieth.This edition includes a valuable collection of the nineteenth-century narratives of invisibility that inspired Wells’s novel, as well as excerpts of Wells’s nonfiction writings on education and class. Additional appendices situate the novel in its late-Victorian scientific and technological contexts, including material on radio waves and x-rays. Trade Review“This is a wonderful edition, setting Wells’s text in a number of rich contexts, especially the history of invisibility literature.” — Simon James, Durham University“A marvelously comprehensive edition of an H.G. Wells classic. Editors Nicole Lobdell and Nancee Reeves meticulously reconstruct The Invisible Man from early printed sources, providing readers with both a seamless narrative experience and a fascinating glimpse into Wells’s creative process. The carefully curated appendices provide rich literary and scientific context for this complex and sometimes troubling scientific romance, and the concluding filmography demonstrates The Invisible Man’s enduring appeal to the popular imagination. Highly recommended for scholars, artists, and students alike.” — Lisa Yaszek, Georgia Institute of Technology“From the striking X-ray ‘Self Portrait’ on the front cover to the eloquent blurbs on the back, the university classroom now has a portable, modestly priced edition of The Invisible Man worthy of Wells’s remarkable ‘grotesque romance.’” — Nicholas Ruddick, Science Fiction StudiesTable of Contents Appendix A: The Four Endings of The Invisible Man a) Pearson’s Weekly, August 1897 b) Pearson, First Edition, September 1897 c) Pearson, Second Edition, November 1897 d) Arnold, New York Edition, November 1897 Appendix B: Invisibility in Nineteenth-Century Fiction a) James Dalton. From The Invisible Gentleman. London: Edward Bull, 1833. I: 61-72. b) Fitz-James O’Brien. From “What Was It? A Mystery” Harper’s Magazine (March 1859): 504-9. c) W. S. Gilbert, “The Perils of Invisibility” (1869). More “Bab” Ballads: Much Sound and Little Sense. London: Routledge, 1872. 178-183. d) Edward Page Mitchell. From “The Crystal Man” The Sun (30 January 1881) e) Charles H. Hinton. From “Stella.” Stella and An Unfinished Communication: Studies of the Unseen. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1895. 55-56. f) Katherine Kip. From “My Invisible Friend” The Black Cat (February 1897): 9-21. Appendix C: Reviews of The Invisible Man a) From “Mr. Wells’s New Stories.” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (18 September 1897), lxxxiv. 322. b) Arnold Bennett. “The Invisible Man.” [Woman 405 (29 September 1897): 9] Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells: A Record of a Personal and Literary Friendship. Ed. Harris Wilson. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960. 258-59. c) Letter from H.G. Wells replying to Arnold Bennett (October 1897) d) Clement Shorter. From “The Invisible Man.” The Bookman [London] (October 1897): 19-20. e) Claudius Clear. From “The Fantastic Fiction; Or, ‘The Invisible Man.’” The Bookman [New York] 6 (November 1897): 250-51. f) “H.G. Wells’s ‘The Invisible Man.’” The New York Times (25 December 1897): BR15. Appendix D: Wells and Friends on The Invisible Man a) Extract from Letter, H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (Received 16 April 1896). b) Extract from Letter, H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (Undated). c) H.G. Wells to James B. Pinker (2 May 1897). d) Joseph Conrad to H.G. Wells (4 December 1898). From Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. Ed. G. Jean-Aubry. New York: Doubleday, 1927. 259-60. Appendix E: Biological Context a) J. Lockhart Gerson, from “On the ‘Invisible Blood Corpuscles’ of Norris.” Journal of Anatomy and Physiology: Normal and Pathological. Macmillan and Co.: London and Cambridge, 1882. b) From W. Robinson, “Notes on Some Albino Birds Presented to the U.S. National Museum, with Some Remarks on Albinism.” Proceedings of The United States National Museum, volume 11, issue 733, 1889. c) From H.G. Wells, “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science. Anti-Vivisection.” The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead. London: Ernest Benn, 1928. 222-227. Appendix F: Technology Contexts: Röntgen Rays and Radio Waves a) Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. From “On a New Kind of Rays” Trans. Arthur Stanton. Nature 53 (23 January 1896): 274-276. b) H.J.W. Dam. From “A Wizard of To-Day.” Pearson’s Magazine. 1 (April 1896): 413-19. c) George Griffith, “A Photograph of the Invisible” Pearson’s Magazine 1 (April 1896) 378-80. d) H.J.W. Dam “The New Telegraphy” The Strand Magazine 13 (March 1897): 273-80. Appendix G: Wells on Class and Society a) H.G. Wells. From Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. United Kingdom; Chapman and Hall, 1901: 229-30. b) H.G. Wells. From A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905. 265-70. c) H.G. Wells. From “Of the New Reign.” An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters. London: Cassel & Co, 1914. 28-32. d) H.G. Wells. From Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of A Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1934: 556.
£16.10
HarperCollins Publishers Robert Louis Stevenson
Book SynopsisThe most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence which has been unavailable to all previous writers.The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevenson's books, including Treasure Island', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and Kidnapped', have achieved world fame; others The Master of Ballantrae', A Child's Garden of Verses', Travels with a Donkey' remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those wTrade Review'Rich and colourful!Harman's book is a delight from beginning to end.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Excellent!RLS has never been portrayed with such diligence and care!her portraits of Stevenson's nearest and dearest are also unsurpassed.' Independent on Sunday 'Cool, ironic and often funny!appreciative, extremely subtle!lively accessible!compelling.' Financial Times 'A smoothly assembled and readable study which confirms Stevenson as a writer of the first importance.' Independent 'Vivid and engaging!Stevenson emerges from her pages as a vital, courageous, contrary and exhilarating figure.' TLS Praise for 'Fanny Burney': 'A great achievement.' Andrew Marr, Observer 'Excellent.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
£15.29
Columbia University Press The Rise of Celebrity Authorship
Book Synopsis
£22.50
Harvard University Press The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde
Book SynopsisOscar Wilde is best remembered for his longer works, his criticism and journalism, and his eventful life. But nothing distills his brilliance like his short fiction. Published here with facing-page annotations and an informative introduction by Nicholas Frankel, the stories pulse with Wilde’s trademark wit, sharp social critique, and tragic love.Trade ReviewA perfect selection of Oscar Wilde stories, with superb annotations by Nicholas Frankel, who is one of the most astute, perceptive, and knowledgeable writers on Wilde. -- Colm TóibínAlthough Oscar Wilde’s literary reputation rests mainly on his plays and essays, he was also the author of a passel of great short stories, ranging from the acerbic ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ to the delicate and heartbreaking ‘The Happy Prince,’ which brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. Edited with thoughtful precision by Nicholas Frankel and replete with beautiful illustrations, The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde will delight Wilde’s admirers. For those reading his work for the first time, it will prove revelatory. -- David LeavittNicholas Frankel’s Introduction and notes open up new contexts and rich complications that make this new edition of the short stories of Oscar Wilde essential reading—and indeed rereading. -- Kate Hext, University of ExeterThis carefully chosen selection brings together some of Oscar Wilde’s most beautiful and haunting stories. Frankel expertly relates Wilde’s tales to the author’s Irish heritage and to the lively scene of Victorian publishing, providing a fascinating account of the material history of the books and periodicals in which they first appeared. -- Stefano Evangelista, University of OxfordOscar Wilde’s stories continue to delight and challenge us today, just as they did his contemporaries. The pleasure of reading them is further enhanced by Nicholas Frankel’s informative and often fascinating annotations. This is a splendid volume. -- Stephen Arata, University of Virginia
£21.56
Princeton University Press Blake and Antiquity
Book SynopsisTrade Review"For Kathleen Raine, Blake was an eighteenth-century herald of a change in thinking that only now is coming to fruition. . . . Blake and Antiquity is the work of a scholar who serves the lovers of literature." * MANAS *
£27.00
Princeton University Press Disarming Intelligence
Book Synopsis
£29.75
Louisiana State University Press Performing Jane
Book SynopsisJane Austen has resonated with readers across generations like no other writer. More than two hundred years after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, people continue to honour dear Jane. In Performing Jane, Sarah Glosson explores this vibrant fandom, examining a long history of Austen fans engaging with her work.
£34.36
University Press of Mississippi The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban
Book SynopsisIn the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the Choking Doberman, the Eaten Ticket, and the Vanishing Hitchhiker. But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from Beetle Eyes to the Shoplifter''s Dilemma and from Hands in the Muff to the Suicide Club. While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media
£23.70
WW Norton & Co Shelleys Poetry and Prose
Book SynopsisThis Second Edition is based on the authoritative texts chosen by the editors from their scholarly edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
£18.99
Oxford University Press Conversations with Dostoevsky
Book SynopsisConversations with Dostoevsky presents a series of fictional conversations taking place between November 2018 and Spring 2019 in the narrator''s Glasgow apartment and elsewhere in the city. At the beginning of the conversations, the narrator has been reading Dostoevsky''s story A Gentle Spirit, which concludes with a dramatic statement of protest atheism. This statement suggests that love is not possible in a purely mechanical universe in which all living beings are condemned to death and ultimate extinction. The conversations spell out Dostoevsky''s response to this view and his advocacy of faith in God, Christ, and immortality. The themes discussed include suicide, truth and lies, guilt, determinism, literature, the Bible, Mary, Christ, Dostoevsky and film, ''the woman question'', nationalism, war, the Church, the Jewish question, immortality, and God. In addition to conversations between the narrator and Dostoevsky, we drop in on a dinner party at which Dostoevsky is discussed from
£28.50
Vintage Publishing Taylor Coleridge S Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
Book SynopsisSamuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834), one of the most imaginative poets of the English Romantic Movement, was also its most influential thinker and philosopher. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written early in his life, during a period of intense and impassioned creativity, and, like all his best work, has a visionary quality with strong religious and metaphysical overtones.Mervyn Peake (19111968) was born in China but moved to England at the age of eleven and studied at Eltham College, Kent, and at the Royal Academy Schools. His striking originality as an artist brought him renown as an illustrator of books such as Alice in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark and Treasure Island. He also wrote poetry and plays, but is best remembered as a writer for his Gormenghast trilogy of novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, an extravagant gothic fantasy that has become a modern classic.Trade ReviewAstonishingly, the poem's spell doesn't seem to weaken over the years... The scenery remains thrillingly hellish, while laced with photographically realistic meteorological effects, and the narrative drive is irresistible * Guardian *Some of his [Coleridge's] poems are indisputably great, and the greatest is probably 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' * Daily Telegraph *The greatest sea poem in the language -- Jonathan RabanThe Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable -- William Wordsworth
£999.99
Oxford University Press Trilby
Book Synopsis''You shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!'' First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O''Ferrall and her mesmeric mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of the time alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular for a number of years, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, and the trilby hat. The setting of the story reflects the author''s bohemian years as an art student in Paris; indeed James McNeill Whistler was to recognize himself in one of the early serialized instalments. George Du Maurier was a celebrated caricaturist for Punch magazine and his drawings for the novel form part of its appeal - this edition includes his most significant illustrations. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus Trade ReviewA captivating, strange and evocative story that brings to life 1850s bohemian Paris. * The Sunday Telegraph *
£8.99
Oxford University Press Selected Poetry
Book SynopsisJohn Keats''s abiding poetic legacy is one of extraordinary and triumphant richness. Before the moment of `self-will'' when he declared his intention to be a poet, Keats (1795-1821) had chosen the medical profession. His apothecary''s training influenced his conception of poetry as an art that could mitigate the world''s suffering. Keats''s generous spirit triumphed over personal sadness, finding expression in his concept of life as a `vale of Soul-making'' rather than a vale of tears. He published only three volumes before his death at the age of 25, and, while many of his contemporaries quickly recognized his genius, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify him. This selection, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition of Keats''s major works, demonstrates the remarkable growth in maturity of his verse, from early poems such as `Imitation of Spenser'' and `Ode to Apollo'' to later work such as ''The Eve of St Agnes'', `Ode to a Nightingale'', and `To Autu
£8.54
Penguin Books Ltd Modernism A Guide to European Literature 18901930
Book SynopsisAn exploration of the ideas, groupings and the social tensions that shaped the transformation of life caused by the changes of modernity in art, science, politics and philosophy
£15.29
Colourpoint Creative Ltd May Lou and Cass Jane Austens Nieces in Ireland
Book SynopsisMarianne, Louise and Cassandra Knight were nieces of the great 19th century novelist who gave us Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Jane knew the girls well, reading and sewing with them as they grew up, and they were often the subject of her witty letters.The Knight sisters went on to lead lives remarkably similar to those of Jane's heroines, experiencing the pains of blighted love, the joy of patience rewarded, and the sorrow of losing their childhood home, but even Austen could not have imagined that they would find themselves in Donegal at a time when Ireland was riven with famine and war.May, Lou and Cass tells for the first time the story of the Knight Sisters and their extraordinary journey from the ordered world of Regency England to the turbulent upheaval of Northern Ireland, exploring Irish History and the heritage of the Austen family.Trade ReviewAn extensively researched document of the lives of the landed gentry of 19th century in these islands.a must for all lovers of Irish history and of Jane Austeninteresting for Austen fans and a sturdy read for anyone curious about the 19th centurybeautifully researched and extremely detailed
£999.99
Penguin Books Ltd A Circle of Sisters
Book SynopsisThe Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.
£15.29
Penguin Books Ltd Henry James
Book SynopsisJames''s correspondents included presidents and prime ministers, painters and great ladies, actresses and bishops, and the writers Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton. This fully-annotated selection from James''s eloquent correspondence allows the writer to reveal himself and the fascinating world in which he lived. The letters provide a rich and fascinating source for James'' views on his own works, on the literary craft, on sex, politics and friendship. Together they constitute, in Philip Horne''s own words, James'' ''real and best biography''.
£17.00
