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'I long to study the purely national, natural character of an Irishwoman' When Horatio, the son of an English lord, is banished to his father's Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts and dissipated living, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild west coast of Connaught he finds remnants of a romantic Gaelic past a dilapidated castle, a Catholic priest, a deposed king and the king's lovely and learned daughter, Glorvina. In this setting and a...

Reveals the secrets and stories that lie beneath the surface of Watson's narratives The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told, or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson's narratives and Holmes's often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle's...

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessio...

Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept tran...

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts - particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeki...

Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’s connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen’s insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family’s financial speculations. She examines the work’s discussion of the moral and social problems of...

I have always loved painting and scenery. The connection between the British landscape seen by all of us with the naked eye and the same landscape seen through the eyes of artists, musicians and writers is fascinating. In A Picture of Britain I will be exploring these links and looking at their impact on our national character, seeking out the countryside we admire and the reasons we cherish it.? David Dimbleby Accompanying a major new BBC One series presented by David Dimbleby and an important...

There was no single 'Elizabethan stage'. Early modern actors exploited various opportunities for patronage and profit between the 1570s and 1642, whether touring, or performing at inns, in country houses, in purpose-built theatres, at court, at the universities or at the inns of court. This authoritative and comprehensive collection of new essays explores the social, political, and economic pressures under which the playing companies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries operated. It shows how t...

This is an essential early Johnson biography, recovered from obscurity and reissued in celebration of the tercentenary of Johnson's birth. This is the first and only scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a work that has not been widely available in complete form for more than two hundred years. Published in 1787, some four years before James Boswell's biography of Johnson, ""Hawkins' Life"" complements, clarifies, and often corrects numerous aspects of Boswell's L...

This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism - as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new 'Enlightened' world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short...

Dombey and Son (1846-48), Dickens's seventh novel, stands at the mid-point of his career. It was begun in Switzerland after a break from near-continuous novel writing and bears the hallmarks of its long gestation and Dickens's deepening engagement with the many cross-currents shaping Britain's social, cultural and political life. Predominant among them are public debates about the need to provide schooling for young children, ethical questions prompted by the demolition of neighbourhoods to make...

This volume gives attention to a popular literary phenomenon that defies modern conventional understandings of literary culture. Claiming to educate young gentlemen in the social arts, miscellanies were booklets that circulated widely in early modern England. They bundled together writing from diverse sources - plat texts, song books, educational tracts, poetry collections - but rarely acknowledged authorship. The material, which was frequently altered from the original, was of a Royalist bent a...

This study surveys Hughes's entire achievement, including "Birthday Letters". It contains a great deal of new information, including extracts from Hughes's letters, and the first publication of the background story of Crow. There are chapters on the mythic imagination, on the poetic relationship of Hughes and Plath, and on the evolution of a Hughes poem through all its manuscript drafts. However, the main purpose is to attempt an adequate reading of his poetry, revealing the underlying quest whi...