Search results

First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a lo...

This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s i...

This collection establishes the term 'medical paratexts' as a useful addition to medical humanities, book history, and literary studies research. As a relatively new field of study, little critical attention has been paid to medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print...

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1...

This book serves as a retrieval and reevaluation of a rich haul of comic caricatures from the turbulent years between the Reform Bill crisis of the early 1830s and the rise and fall of Chartism in the 1840s. With a telling selection of illustrations, this book deploys the techniques of close reading and political contextualization to demonstrate the aesthetic and ideological clout of a neglected tranche of satirical prints and periodicals dismissed as ineffectual by historians or distasteful by...

First published in 1971, this book examines the literary style of Naturalism. After introducing the reader to the term itself, including its history and its relationship to Realism, it goes on to trace the origins of the Naturalist movement as well as particular groups which adhered to Naturalism and the theories they espoused. It also provides a summary of the key Naturalist literary works and concludes which a brief reflection on the movement as a whole. This book will be of interest to those...

Henry James was fascinated by clothing and dress. This book examines, for the first time, the role of dress in reinforcing thematic and symbolic patterns in James's fictional world. Hughes traces a development from the significance of dress in discussion of 'the American Girl' in the early works, through dress as an indicator of social position, to the emergence of the more unstable and threatening aspects of dress, which culminate in the strange case of the coat of changing colours in The Sense...

This book discovers in the imaginative life of the Shavian "oeuvre" a mythology of self, of which the political and social themes are aspects. Understanding "the sublime" as the modes of self-transcedence sought by an authorial will and "comic" as the resistances to these, Gordon shows how their interaction creates characteristic dramatic effects. In his style of analysis, genres like romance and comedy become psychological acts as well as conventional forms. In a theoretical first chapter, the...

British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include c...

This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man's place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comedie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the 'first' novels in each author's series (La Pere Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To desc...

Romanticism and the City explores how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature conceptualized urban space. Fresh readings of key texts show how Romantic concerns with urban life shaped both individual works and broad theoretical issues in European Romanticism at large.

The book examines the perception of the organist as the most influential musical figure in Victorian society through the writings of Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning. This will be the first book in the burgeoning area of research into the relationship of music and literature that examines the societal perceptions of a figure central to civic life in Victorian England. This book is deliberately interdisciplinary and will be of special interest to literature scholars and students of Victorian stu...

This study of Shaw is an attempt to provide a record of the impact Shaw made on his contemporaries and of the way in which he presented himself and his opinions in published interviews. Shaw is seen here through the eyes of many of his famous contemporaries as well as lesser-known witnesses. The interviews bear the stamp of Shaw's characteristically lively and provocative style and throw light on his attitudes towards a wide range of autobiographical, theatrical, political, economic and social t...