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The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. Dr. Howells proposes a radical reassessment of these novels to emphasize their importance as experiments in imaginative writing. Her object, the study of feeling, is central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodi...

«Figures of Exile is an excellent volume of essays carefully curated by Daniela Omlor and Eduardo Tasis that pays a long overdue homage to the late Nigel Dennis, one of the most important Hispanists of his generation. It does so brilliantly by bringing together a group of talented international scholars – the majority of whom can be considered as Professor Dennis’s disciples – who each offer original and illuminating perspectives on a variety of topics and authors related to the Spanish Republic...

First published in 1981, this study sees Wordsworth's work as part of the continuous European struggle to come to terms with consciousness. The author pays particular attention to Wordsworth's style and investigates the unstated and unconscious assumptions of that style. He discusses the conflicting feelings that shaped Wordsworth's changing conception of The Recluse, offers a new interpretation of his classification of his poems and examines the meaning of one of his favourite images - the pano...

These essays explore some of the most significant current issues concerning the terrain of the Gothic perspective, offering a variety of possible answers to the crucial question: What is Gothic? The collection begins by addressing general issues about the locations and structure of Gothic; this is followed by various considerations of Gothic as a specific historical phenomenon, linked with specific aspects of British, American, and European society; and, finally, by an exploration of Gothic writ...

In the first book-length study of the well-respected and popular British writer Elizabeth Hamilton, Claire Grogan addresses a significant gap in scholarship that enlarges and complicates critical understanding of the Romantic woman writer. From 1797 to 1818, Hamilton published in a wide range of genres, including novels, satires, historical and educational treatises, and historical biography. Because she wrote from a politically centrist position during a revolutionary age, Grogan suggests, Hami...

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is its own type of monster mythos that will not die, a corpus whose parts keep getting harvested to animate new artistic creations. What makes this tale so adaptable and so resilient that, nearly 200 years later, it still seems vitally relevant in a culture radically different from the one that spawned its birth? Monstrous Progeny takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the Frankenstein family tree, tracing the literary and intellectual roots of Shel...

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime and Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, and profligacy. Significantly, the book was on Tolstoy's beds...

The Roman de la rose, one of the most important, complex poems of medieval France, has given rise to highly divergent readings since Jean de Meun completed it in the thirteenth century. In Internal Difference and Meanings in the Roman de la rose, one of the foremost authorities on medieval French literature brings his considerable erudition to bear on this classic of medieval romance, illuminating its artistry and controversial morality Douglas Kelly interprets the Roman de la rose in the contex...

Romantic love has challenged and vexed feminist thought from its origins. Judging from the shelves of books advising women on love problems, there seems to be an ongoing difficulty in maintaining equality in romantic relationships. Does romance weaken or empower women? Why do women seem overwhelmingly attracted to romantic love in spite of raised consciousness in other areas of life that is a legacy of feminism? Have women always been seen as the sex which most seeks love and is best suited for...

If, as George Gissing once wrote, ""to like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry"", then the essays collected in this volume suggest that literary criticism remains a lively and vigorous endeavour. Written by a broad range of prominent scholars - senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets - the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthetic or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of...

Edmund Burke was one of the foremost philosophers of the eighteenth century and wrote widely on aesthetics, politics and society. In this landmark work, he propounds his theory that the sublime and the beautiful should be regarded as distinct and wholly separate states - the first, an experience inspired by fear and awe, the second an expression of pleasure and serenity. Eloquent and profound, "A Philosophical Enquiry" is an involving account of our sensory, imaginative and judgmental processes...

Shelley's Music: Fantasy, Authority and the Object Voice regards music images and allusions to music in Shelley's writing as evidence that Shelley sought to infuse the masculine word with the music of feminine expression. Set within his configuration of hetero-erotic relationships, this agenda reveals Shelley's desire to remain eternally present in his poetry. In the end, Shelley fails to achieve this goal, because he failed to overcome an even stronger desire to preserve male authority. Shell...

Demonstrating the breadth and scope of women’s writing in the Romantic period, this collection covers a variety of topics ranging across polemical treatises, private correspondence, philosophical and historical disquisitions, and poetry and prose fiction. Helping to contextualise the areas discussed, the collection includes a general introduction by the editor, which traces the history of criticism in the field, and thus current definitions of "Women and Romanticism", before going on to discuss...