This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1901, are followed by essays on topics including sexuality, sensation, cityscapes, melodrama, epic and economics. Victorian writing is placed in its complex relation to the Empire, Europe and America, as well as to Britain's component nations. The final chapters consider how Victorian literature, and the period as a whole, influenced twentieth-century writers. Original, lucid and stimulating, each chapter is an important contribution to Victorian literary studies. Together, the contributors create an engaging discussion of the ways in which the
Living or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child's emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role liter
An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has r
For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. InQueer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespear
Offers an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalise practical engagements
Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary
Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary
Through its rich foray into popular literary culture and medical history, this book investigates representations of regular and irregular medical practice in early modern England. Focusing on the prol
Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established,Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist
This book uses theories of memory derived from cognitive science to offer new ways of understanding how literary works remember other literary works. Using terms derived from psychology – implicit and explicit memory, interference and forgetting – Raphael Lyne shows how works by Renaissance writers such as Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton interact with their sources. The poems and plays in question are themselves sources of insight into the workings of memory, sharing and anticipating some scientific categories in the process of their thinking. Lyne proposes a way forward for cognitive approaches to literature, in which both experiments and texts are valued as contributors to interdisciplinary questions. His book will interest researchers and upper-level students of renaissance literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, memory studies, and classical reception.
Time, Domesticity and Print Culture combines literary criticism with innovative readings of texts' material form. The author argues that the way writing was transmitted – as monthly instalments or per
This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. Most ecocritical scholarship te
This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing
Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Vict
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing elect
Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultura
Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultura
For poetry in England, the Regency years (1811-1820) were a time of cultural revolution, with key figures such as Robert Southey and Leigh Hunt. Revisiting the wide impact of this period, this collect
From devotional literature that idealizes wives' submission to unwanted sex to political narratives that frame women's survival of sexual violence as a model for a just monarch, medieval texts propose
What if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other words, liter
