Search results for ""Author Ian Duncan""

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary scienceThe 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains.Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul.The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.

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More than a century after the Norman Conquest, England remains a colony of foreign warlords. The dissolute Prince John plots to seize his brother's crown, his barons terrorize the country, and the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood haunts the ancient greenwood. The secret return of King Richard and the disinherited Saxon knight, Ivanhoe, heralds the start of a splendid and tumultuous romance, featuring the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, the siege of Torquilstone, and the clash of wills between the wicked Templar Bois-Guilbert and the sublime Jewess Rebecca. In Ivanhoe Scott fashioned an imperial myth of national cultural identity that has shaped the popular imagination ever since its first appearance at the end of 1819. The most famous of Scottish novelists drew on the conventions of Gothic fiction, including its risky sexual and racial themes, to explore the violent origins and limits of English nationality. This edition uses the 1830 Magnum Opus text, corrected against the Interleaved Set, and incorporates readings from Scott's manuscript. The introduction examines the originality and cultural importance of Ivanhoe, and draws on current work by historians and cultural critics. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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James Hogg (1770-1835) is increasingly recognised as a major Scottish author and one of the most original figures in European Romanticism. 16 essays written by international experts on Hogg draw on recent breakthroughs in research to illuminate the contexts and debates that helped to shape his writings. The book provides an indispensable guide to Hogg's life and worlds, his publishing history, reception and reputation, his treatments of politics, religion, nationality, social class, sexuality and gender, and the diverse literary forms - ballads, songs, poems, drama, short stories, novels, periodicals - in which he wrote. Key Features: * Thorough coverage of the whole of Hogg's works, career and contexts, as well as detailed considerations of his most famous work, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner * The contributors are all major figures in Hogg studies and include editors of the definitive Stirling South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, including Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Wyoming), Hans de Groot (Toronto), Penny Fielding(Edinburgh), Peter Garside (Edinburgh) and Gillian Hughes.

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For the most popular of his Scottish romances, published at the end of 1817, Scott drew on the legends and historical anecdotes about Rob Roy MacGregor he had collected in his youth. The famous outlaw is only one of a series of vivid characters who cast their spell of the novel's hero, Frank Osbaldistone, on his journey through the wild northern territories of the new United Kingdom. Banished from his father's house, falling hopelessly in love with the spirited Diana Vernon, Frank becomes involved in he conspiracy surrounding the disastrous Jacobite rising of 1715. His adventures take him to `MacGregor's country', across the Highland Line, where he finds cruelty, heartbreak, and some unlikely friends. By turns thrilling and comic, Rob Roy contains Scott's most sophisticated treatment of the Scottish Highlands as an imaginary space where the modern and the primitive come together. Newly edited from the `Magnum Opus' text of 1830, this edition includes full explanatory notes and a critical introduction exploring the originality and complexity of Scott's achievement. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'How is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!' - William Bartram 'Thus you see, dear sister, the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would have us believe.' - Mary Wortley Montagu With widely varied motives - scientific curiosity, commerce, colonization, diplomacy, exploration, and tourism - British travellers fanned out to every corner of the world in the period the Critical Review labelled the 'Age of Peregrination'. The Empire, already established in the Caribbean and North America, was expanding in India and Africa and founding new outposts in the Pacific in the wake of Captain Cook's voyages. In letters, journals, and books, travellers wrote at first-hand of exotic lands and beautiful scenery, and encounters with strange peoples and dangerous wildlife. They conducted philosophical and political debates in print about slavery and the French Revolution, and their writing often affords unexpected insights into the writers themselves. This anthology brings together the best writing from authors such as Daniel Defoe, Celia Fiennes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Mungo Park, and many others, to provide a comprehensive selection from this emerging literary genre. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg's most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Exhibiting the most complex genesis of any of Hogg's works, it is the outstanding example of a 'national' genre pioneered by him -- the miscellaneous collection of popular and traditional narratives. Hogg's experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott. The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and -- the highlights of the edition -- two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane. Reprinted in incomplete and unreliable texts in Victorian editions of Hogg's works, Winter Evening Tales fell into almost total obscurity after the author's death. The Stirling/ South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg is delighted to republish this key work in Hogg's career in its entirety for the first time since the early nineteenth century.

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'We have heard much of the rage of fanaticism in former days, but nothing to this' A wretched young man, 'an outcast in the world', tells the story of his upbringing by a heretical Calvinist minister who leads him to believe that he is one of the elect, predestined for salvation and thus above the moral law. Falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, he embarks on a career as a serial murderer. Robert Wringhim's Memoirs are presented by an editor whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is Wringhim the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God's enemies? Hogg's sardonic and terrifying novel, too perverse for nineteenth-century taste, is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of Romantic fiction. The first edition text of 1824 has been freshly considered for this new edition. A critical introduction explores the remarkable career of the novel's author and its historical, theological, and cultural contexts. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'Your bed shall be the moorcock's, and your life shall be like the hunted deer's, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.' Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson's prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson's last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson's 'Note to Kidnapped', reprinted for the first time since 1922. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Winter Evening Tales (1820; second edition 1821) was James Hogg's most successful work of prose fiction in his lifetime. Its experimental medley of novellas, tales, poems and sketches posed a lively alternative to the dominant form of the historical novel established by Walter Scott. The collection includes terse masterpieces of mystery and the uncanny, virtuoso improvisations on folktale themes, and two brilliant autobiographical novellas, The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee and Love Adventures of Mr George Cochrane. This paperback edition takes account of newly-discovered information about An Old Soldier's Tale and The Long Pack. A critical introduction, explanatory notes, reading list and Hogg chronology are provided to assist the reader in appreciating Hogg's entertaining and challenging tale collection to the full.

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`the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks with influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear.' Headed by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger, a scientific expedition sets out to explore a plateau in South America that remains frozen in time from the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Seemingly impossible to penetrate, this lost word holds great danger for the four men, whether from fiendish ape-men or terrifying prehistoric creatures. Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of adventure and discovery still excites the reader today, just as dinosaurs continue to grip the popular imagination. 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 a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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