Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

There is no English novelist whose reputation has fluctuated so violently as that of George Meredith. First published in 1971, this volume of essays reassesses the works of George Meredith. Despite his unevenness, the essays demonstrate that Meredith was...

Explores the coevolution of Absolute idealist philosophy and British fiction from the Romantic period forward.Absolute Fiction examines the principal form of idealism in the modern period, Absolute idealism, which posits that mind and matter must be...

This book focuses on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it demonstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, and details literary and...

Though popular opinion would have us see Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There as whimsical, nonsensical, and thoroughly enjoyable stories told mostly for children; contemporary research has shown us...

Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult...

Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon,...

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad attests to the global significance and enduring importance of Conrad's works, reception, and legacy. This groundbreaking collection shows how Conrad's works - their artistry, vision, and ideas - continue to...

The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation in the literary uses of dialect, with dialect becoming a key feature in the development of the realist novel, dialect songs being printed by the hundreds in urban centres and dialect poetry becoming a...

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the...

This book places Germaine de Stael's influential novel, Corrine, or Italy (1807) in relation to preceding and subsequent stereotypes of Italy as seen in the works of Northern European and American travel writers since the Renaissance.

This book demonstrates how D.H. Lawrence's prophetic ambitions impelled him to create novels that would radically transform the consciousness of his readers. Charles Burack argues that Lawrence's major novels, beginning with The Rainbow , are structured...

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of...

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...

This book is a critical biography of Grant Allen, (1848-1899), the first for a century, based on all the surviving primary sources. Born in Kingston, Ontario, into a cultured and affluent family, Allen was educated in France and England. A mysterious...

Lady Caroline Lamb , among Lord Byron's many lovers, stands out - vilified, portrayed as a self-destructive nymphomaniac - her true story has never been told. Now, Paul Douglass provides the first unbiased treatment of a woman whose passions and...

This collection of essays attempts to address the disparate historical and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth century England, showing how a representative group of major Victorians negotiated its impact. The...

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become...

Henry James and the Abuse of the Past explores the complex uses to which James puts his oblique experience of the American Civil War. Why does James use and abuse the past by fabricating and distorting people and events in his autobiographical work? The...

Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses...

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously neglected area of social and...

Tennyson is the most important English poet of the Victorian age. He knew its key figures and was deeply involved in its science, religion, philosophy and politics. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary for the first time gives easily accessible information,...

Blake's Night Thoughts discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth-century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking 'night' as the...

This new volume in the Author Chronology series offers an intense articulation of Henry James's biographical experiences, which are presented amid the detailed unfolding of his imaginative writing, and set in the larger context of historical developments...

Encounters in the Victorian Periodical Press focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press - its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors. Encounters promoted dialogue among diverse publics,...

This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to...

Detection existed in fiction long before Poe and Doyle. Its real origins lurk in the popular press of the early Nineteenth century, where the detective and the case were steadily developed. The well-known masters of early crime fiction, including Collins...

Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that...

What was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces...

This book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made...

Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William...

Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari and that of Jean Laplanche - particularly his major and as yet still relatively unfamiliar notion of the phantasme - Social Formation in Hardy's Major Novels is an original and groundbreaking...

During the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex...

The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic to the late 19th century metropolis, this volume...