This book examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot's works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George Eliot - whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India - and also dismissals of the postcolonial as ahistorical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels. It also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot's impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xe...
This book applies the growing theoretical field of hauntology to a body of literature which has previously been examined through the lenses of Orientalism and exoticism. Through a chronological study and close readings of the writings of Theophile Gautier, Eugene Fromentin, Gustave Flaubert, and Pierre Loti, the project identifies haunting echoes within the texts which demonstrate an ambivalence of attitudes towards colonialism and which undermine any claim towards a monolithic imperialist Frenc...
Both Tennyson and the term 'Englishness' - coined in 1804 - date from the same decade and critics identified Tennyson as an English poet from the first reviews of his published poems in the 1820s. As Poet Laureate, Tennyson became the authoritative public voice of English poetry and one of the 'thinking men of England'. By the late nineteenth century, an ideology of Englishness had been established which was reflected in and shaped by cultural forces and emerging myths in general and Tennyson's...
Locating Classed Subjectivities explores representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory and analysis. By analyzing a range of class-conscious texts from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries, the collection provides an overview of the way British writers mobilized spatial aesthetics as a means to comment on the intricacies of social class. In doing so, the collection delineates aesthetic strategies of representation in British writing, tra...
Mary Shelley's Early Novels seeks to redress the commonly held view that Mary Shelley was simply another mouthpiece for her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her most challenging and ambitious novels; Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Last Man, are examined in the light of her intellectual relationship with Percy Shelley. We see the way in which these novels reflect her gradual rejection of his radical tenets in an assertion of her own intellectual and ideological independence.
Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880 - 1920
by Dr Emily Ennis
At the turn of the 20th century, printing and photographic technologies evolved rapidly, leading to the birth of mass media and the rise of the amateur photographer. Demonstrating how this development happened symbiotically with great changes in the shape of British literature, Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880-1920 explores this co-evolution, showing that as both writing and photography became tools of mass dissemination, literary writers were forced to re-ev...
Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions (Among the Victorians and Modernists)
Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and biographical projects s...
This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as well as the series' film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of communication for girls. Although melodrama has saturated popular culture since the nineteenth century, its expression in texts for, about, and by girls ha...
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esme Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are rep...
Known as a distinctly English author, D.H. Lawrence is reevaluated as a creator and critic of American literature in this imaginative study. From 1922 to 1925, during his "savage pilgrimage" in Mexico and New Mexico, D.H. Lawrence completed the core of what Lee Jenkins terms his "American oeuvre" - including his major volume of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature. By examining Lawrence's experiences in the Americas, including his fascination with indigenous cultures, Jenkins illus...
This book studies the print culture of the nineteenth century as it shaped the meanings and the cultural significance of literary works by women writers - Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, Caroline Norton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and others. Colour'd Shadows explains and interprets the physical forms of their books, the economics and politics of production and reception, and the cultural meanings of their literary work, showing how poems,...
The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches - intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics - Westbrook first analyzes Wordsworth's theory and practice as these reflect the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation. Subsequent chapters consider Wordsworth's adaptation of biblical narrative forms - etymological tales, parables, and mystical alle...
'... a significant, wide-ranging study ... Above all, the book restores a salutary sense of the value of, and the difficult poise involved in, creative acts.' - Michael O'Neill, Durham University Taken together, these interlinked studies on topics such as the literary influences at work in the 1790s, Newman's resistance to Romantic ideas, the exact nature of Virginia Woolf's debt to Walter Pater and the counter-Romanticism of Lawrence and Eliot constitute a large reading of Romanticism from 1789...
An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national c...
This is a study of the development of skill and maturity in Hardy's poetry which climaxed in his lyric poems. The author's examination reveals that the lyrics were a synthesis of the traditions of the major Romantic lyric, architectural theory, the late Gothic novel, painting and theories of art, philosophy, the Victorian novel, ballads, theories of the grotesque, the folklore of ghosts, essays on war and traditions of pastoral. Also contributing to this form of poetry, which the author contends...
Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835 (The New Urban Atlantic)
by Cynthia Schoolar Williams
Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835 argues that a select group of late-Romantic English and American writers disrupted national tropes by reclaiming their countries' shared historical identification with hospitality. In doing so, they reimagined the spaces of encounter: the city, the coast of England, and the Atlantic itself.
Against the backdrop of Britain's underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and h...
The Trollope Critics