In this highly original collection leading scholars address the largely overlooked genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius. The book includes essays on the firs
Arguing that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, Anna Johnson analyzes missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnson reveals how missionaries were caug
Examining the important role played by the Victorian periodical in defining and refining gender roles during the second half of the nineteenth century, this study analyzes the periodical press in nine
This innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book. The multidisciplinary essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of p
This book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific that depict Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and pri
In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. T
In Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Lucy Hartley examines the emergence of physiognomy as a form of popular science. Physiognomy posited an understanding of the
Magazines and periodicals played a far greater role than books in influencing the Victorians' understanding of the new discoveries and theories in science, technology and medicine of their era. This b
Janis Caldwell investigates the links between the growing scientific materialism of the nineteenth century and the persistence of the Romantic literary imagination. Through closely analyzing literary
Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are transformed in Vic
Sudden changes, opportunities, or revelations have always carried a special significance in Western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments, events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.
From his boyhood Oscar Wilde was haunted by the literature and culture of ancient Greece, but until now no full-length study has considered in detail the texts, institutions and landscapes through which he imagined Greece. The archaeology of Celtic Ireland, explored by the young Wilde on excavations with his father, informed both his encounter with the archaeology of Greece and his conviction that Celt and Greek shared a hereditary aesthetic sensibility, while major works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest maintain a dynamic, creative relationship with originary texts such as Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's dialogues and the then lost comedies of Menander. Drawing on unpublished archival material, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece offers a new portrait of a writer whose work embodies both the late-nineteenth-century conflict between literary and material antiquity and his own contradictory impulses towards Hellenist form and the formlessness of desire.
'Michael Field' (1884-1914) was the pseudonym of two women, the aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together as 'lovers'. The large oeuvre contains poems, dramas, an
Gail Marshall looks at actresses on the English stage of the later nineteenth century, and argues that much of their work was determined by the popularity at the time of images of Classical sculpture.
This book is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli and Wilde. It has two emphases--to demonst
