This study argues for Hogg's centrality to British Romanticism, resituating his work in relation to many of his more famous Romantic contemporaries. Hogg creates a unique literary style which, the author argues, is best described as 'kaleidoscopic' in view of its similarities with David Brewster's kaleidoscope, invented in 1816.
The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Part VI Volume 25 (The Pickering Masters)
Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work. This volume includes her 1895 novel Old Mr Tredgold with editorial notes by Elisabeth Jay including a new introduction and headnote, proving key infor...
America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature
by B MILLER
In an innovative reading of fin-de-siecle cultural texts, Miller argues that British representations of America, Americans, and Anglo-American relations at the turn of the twentieth century provided an important forum for cultural distinction.
"Jane Eyre" (New Casebooks)
Overlooked or dismissed by critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jane Eyre first began to attract serious critical attention in the 1970s as New Critical, formalist and feminist critics began to re-evaluate Charlotte Bronte's achievement. This New Casebook brings together essays by leading scholars over the past twenty years, encouraging the student to consider a range of different critical approaches.
The locked room has long fascinated readers of detective fiction with its images of entrapment and entombment. Narratives of Enclosure is the first full length critical study of the Locked Room Mystery, tracing its origins in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', the first detective story, up to the modern era. Looking beyond the facade of the impossible crime to examine stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Paul Auster, Michael Cook...
At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as s...
Thomas Hardy's first love was always poetry. It was not until 1898, when he was fifty-eight years old, having already established his reputation with fourteen novels and over forty short stories, that his first book of poetry, Wessex Poems was published. For the final thirty years of his life he abandoned fiction and devoted himself entirely to poetry. It is a tribute to his remarkable powers of creativity that he is now not only regarded as one of the most important English novelists but is als...
From Iceland to the Americas (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)
This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson's visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its rece...
An exploration of Stoicism's central role in British and American writing of the Romantic periodStoic philosophers and Romantic writers might seem to have nothing in common: the ancient Stoics championed the elimination of emotion, and Romantic writers made a bold new case for expression, adopting "powerful feeling" as the bedrock of poetry. Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion refutes this notion by demonstrating that Romantic-era writers devoted a surprising amount of attention to Stoic...
The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society)
by John Herdman
Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later nineteenth-century heirs. This book deals with the double, or Doppelgnger, as a dominant theme in the fiction of the period, and with its relation to the problem of evil. It suggests that the literary double flourished best when psychological and religious understandings of human dividedness were in ha...
The hardness of stone, the pliancy of wood, the fluidity of palm oil, the crystalline nature of salt, and the vegetable qualities of moss – each describes a way of being in and understanding the world. These substances are both natural objects hailed in Romantic literature and global commodities within a system of extraction and exchange that has driven climate change, representing the paradox of the modern relation to materiality. In Common Things examines these five common substances – stone...
Dostoevsky at 200
Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky's birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer's art - specifically the tension between experience and formal representation - as its central theme. While many critical approaches to Dostoevsky's works are concerned with spiritual and philosophical dilemmas, this volume focuses instead on questions of design and narrative to explore Dostoevsky and the novel from a multitude of perspectives. Contributors situate Dostoevsky's formal choi...
Spoken word is one of the most popular styles of poetry in North America. While its prevalence is often attributed to the form's strong ties to oral culture, Recalling Recitation in the Americas reveals how poetry memorization and recitation curricula, shaped by British Imperial policy, influenced contemporary performance practices. During the early twentieth century, educators frequently used the recitation of canonical poems to instill "proper" speech and behaviour in classrooms in Canada,...
This fiercely comic tale stands in marked contrast to its genial predecessor, The Pickwick Papers. Set against London's seedy back street slums, Oliver Twist is the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the "ghostly gallows." Yet at the hea...
John Galt's Annals of the Parish and The Provost (Scotnotes Study Guides)
by Ian McGhee
The SCOTNOTES booklets are a series of study guides to major Scottish writers and texts frequently used within literature courses, aimed at senior secondary school pupils and students in further education. The individual authors are not only experts on a particular writer or text but also experienced in teaching in schools or colleges. John Galt (1779-1839) was a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, and a friend and biographer of Lord Byron. His writings are full of acute observati...
An attempt to draw together the important details of Woolf's working life in a single volume, allowing the reader to trace her development as novelist, feminist and literary journalist against the background of the age.
Explores the literary connection between Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim Elizabeth von Arnim is best remembered as the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Enchanted April (1922), as well as being the elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield. Recently, new research into the complex relationship between these writers has extended our understanding of the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. We know that they were an influential pre...
D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet addresses a particular body of language and thought within Lawrence's oeuvre where the metaphorical, the poetic and the philosophical are intricately enmeshed. Lawrence emerges as a writer who pulls metaphor away from its merely rhetorical moorings: his distinctive style is the hallmark of one who thinks not analytically but poetically, about the birth of the self, the body unconscious, complex kinds of otherness and about metaphor itself as a mode of understan...
This book proposes a comparative approach to the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant. It offers an alternative to predominantly novel-centric and Anglo-centric perspectives on literary pre-modernism by investigating a transnational and multilingual connection between genre, theme and theory, i.e., between the modern short story, the supernatural and the problem of knowledge. Incorporating a close analysis of the literary texts into a discussion of th...
The Wildness Pleases (Routledge Revivals) (Routledge Revivals)
by Christopher Thacker
First published in 1983. This book charts the growth of Romanticism from the initial reactions to the authoritarian classicism of Louis XIV, through the 'codification' of the Sublime by Burke in the 1750s, to the fascination with mystery, fear and violence which dominated the writing of the late eighteenth century. The origins of the movement are found in the writings of Rousseau and admiration for the 'noble savage', the development of the landscape garden, discoveries in the South Seas, new ap...
British Sociability in the European Enlightenment
This volume covers a broad range of everyday private and public, touristic, commercial and fictional encounters between Britons and continental Europeans, in a variety of situations and places: moments that led to a meaningful exchange of opinions, practices, or concepts such as friendship or politeness. It argues that, taken together, travel accounts, commercial advice, letters, novels and philosophical works of the long eighteenth century, reveal the growing impact of British sociability on...