In 1932, two years after D. H. Lawrence’s death, a young woman wrote a book about him and presented it to a Paris publisher. She recorded the event in her diary: “It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within oneself. He gave it to his assistant to revise.” The woman was Anaïs Nin.

Nin examined Lawrence’s poetry, novels, essays, and travel writing. She analyzed and explained the more important philosophical concepts contained in his writings, particularly the themes of love, death, and religion, as well as his attention to primitivism and to women. But what Anaïs Nin brought to the explication of Lawrence’s writing was an understanding of the fusion of imaginative, intuitive, and intellectual elements from which he drew his characters, themes, imagery and symbolism.

A charming memento of the Victorian era’s literary colossus, The Daily Charles Dickens is a literary almanac for the ages. Tenderly and irreverently anthologized by Dickens scholar James R. Kincaid, this collection mines the British author’s beloved novels and Christmas stories as well as his lesser-known sketches and letters for “an around-the-calendar set of jolts, soothings, blandishments, and soarings.”

A bedside companion to dip into year round, this book introduces each month with a longer seasonal quote, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. Hopping gleefully from Esther Summerson’s abandonment by her mother in Bleak House to a meditation on the difficult posture of letter-writing in The Pickwick Papers, this anthology displays the wide range of Dickens’s stylistic virtuosity—his humor and his deep tragic sense, his ear for repetition, and his genius at all sorts of voices. Even the devotee will find between these pages a mix of old friends and strangers—from Oliver Twist and Ebenezer Scrooge to the likes of Lord Coodle, Sir Thomas Doodle, Mrs. Todgers, and Edwin Drood—as well as a delightful assortment of the some of the novelist’s most famous, peculiar, witty, and incisive passages, tailored to fit the season. To give one particularly apt example: David Copperfield blunders, in a letter of apology to Agnes Wickfield, “I began one note, in a six-syllable line, ‘Oh, do not remember’—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity.”

Never Pecksniffian or Gradgrindish, this daily dose of Dickens crystallizes the novelist’s agile humor and his reformist zeal alike. This is a book to accompany you through the best of times and the worst of times.
 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is eminently, delightfully, and delectably quotable. This truth goes far beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice, which has muscled out many other excellent sentences. So many gems of wit and wisdom from her novels deserve to be better known, from Northanger Abbey on its lovable, naive heroine—“if adventures will not befal a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad”—to Persuasion’s moving lines of love from its regret-filled hero: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late.”
 
Devoney Looser, a.k.a. Stone Cold Jane Austen, has drawn 378 genuine, Austen-authored passages from across the canon, resulting in an anthology that is compulsively readable and repeatable. Whether you approach the collection on a one-a-day model or in a satisfying binge read, you will emerge wiser about Austen, if not about life. The Daily Jane Austen will amuse and inspire skeptical beginners, Janeite experts, and every reader in between by showcasing some of the greatest sentences ever crafted in the history of fiction.

Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form.

By partnering cultural discourses with representations of the dance and the dancer in novels such as Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda, Molly Engelhardt makes explicit many of the ironies underlying Victorian practices that up to this time have gone unnoticed in critical circles. She analyzes the role of the illustrious dance master, who created and disseminated the manners and moves expected of fashionable society, despite his position as a social outsider of nebulous origins. She describes how the daughters of the social elite were expected to “come out” to society in the ballroom, the most potent space in the cultural imagination for licentious behavior and temptation. These incongruities generated new, progressive ideas about the body, subjectivity, sexuality, and health.

Engelhardt challenges our assumptions about Victorian sensibilities and attitudes toward the sexual/social roles of men and women by bringing together historical voices from various fields to demonstrate the versatility of the dance, not only as a social practice but also as a forum for Victorians to engage in debate about the body and its pleasures and pathologies.

The curious paradox of romance is that, throughout its history, this genre has been dismissed as trivial and unintellectual, yet people have never ceased to flock to it with enthusiasm and even fervor. In contemporary contexts, we devour popular romance and fantasy novels like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, reference them in conversations, and create online communities to expound, passionately and intelligently, upon their characters and worlds. But romance is “unrealistic,” critics say, doing readers a disservice by not accurately representing human experiences. It is considered by some to be a distraction from real literature, a distraction from real life, and little more.

Yet is it possible that romance is expressing a truth—and a truth unrecognized by realist genres? The Arthurian literature of the Middle Ages, Karen Sullivan argues, consistently ventriloquizes in its pages the criticisms that were being made of romance at the time, and implicitly defends itself against those criticisms. The Danger of Romance shows that the conviction that ordinary reality is the only reality is itself an assumption, and one that can blind those who hold it to the extraordinary phenomena that exist around them. It demonstrates that that which is rare, ephemeral, and inexplicable is no less real than that which is commonplace, long-lasting, and easily accounted for. If romance continues to appeal to audiences today, whether in its Arthurian prototype or in its more recent incarnations, it is because it confirms the perception—or even the hope—of a beauty and truth in the world that realist genres deny.

Refuting commonly held beliefs within women’s and lesbian history, feminist theory, and histories of the novel, Dangerous Intimacies challenges the idea that sex between women was unimaginable in British culture before the late nineteenth century. Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations of female sexual agency—and in particular "sapphic" relationships between women—were central to eighteenth-century debates over English national identity. Moore shows how the novel’s representation of women’s "romantic friendships"—both platonic and sexual—were encoded within wider social concerns regarding race, nation, and colonialist ventures.
Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual. She looks at instances of sapphism in such novels as Millenium Hall, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Belinda, and Emma and analyzes how the new literary form of the novel made the bourgeois heroine’s successful negotiation of female friendship central to the establishment of her virtue. Moore also examines representations of sapphism through the sweeping economic and political changes of the period and claims that middle-class readers’ identifications with the heroine’s virtue helped the novel’s bourgeois audience justify the violent bases of their new prosperity, including slavery, colonialism, and bloody national rivalry.
In revealing the struggle over sapphism at the heart of these novels of female friendship—and at the heart of England’s national identity—Moore shows how feminine sexual agency emerged as an important cultural force in post-Enlightenment England

Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

 

Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time in a beautiful facsimile edition that reproduces Conan Doyle’s notebook pages in his own elegant hand, accompanied by his copious illustrations. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the facsimile and annotated transcript of the diary, the volume contains photographs of the Hope, its captain, and a young Conan Doyle on deck with its officers; two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.

 

To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.

In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the “first real outstanding adventure” of his life, taking a berth as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, “came of age at 80 degrees north latitude.”

 

Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

 

Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the transcript of the diary, the e-book contains two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.

 

To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.

Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.

Placing Eliot’s diverse and wide-ranging treatment of Otherness in its contemporary context, Alicia Carroll argues that Eliot both engages and resists traditional racial and ethnic representations of Otherness. Carroll finds that Eliot, like other women writers of her time, often appropriates narratives of Otherness to explore issues silenced in mainstream Victorian culture, particularly the problem of the desirous woman. But if Otherness in Eliot’s century was usually gendered as woman and constructed as the object of white male desire, Eliot often seeks to subvert that vision. Professor Carroll demonstrates Eliot’s tendency to “exoticize” images of girlhood, vocation, and maternity in order to critique and explore gendered subjectivities. Indeed, the disruptive presence of a racial or ethnic outsider often fractures Eliot’s narratives of community, creating a powerful critique of home culture.

The consistent reliance of Eliot’s work upon racial and ethnic Otherness as a mode of cultural critique is explored here for the first time in its entirety.

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.

Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania

The plague first arrived in the English port of Weymouth in the summer of 1348. Two years later, half of Britain was dead, but the Black Death was just beginning. In the decades to come, England would suffer recurring outbreaks, social and cultural upheaval, and violent demographic shifts. The pandemic was, by any measure, a massive cultural trauma; however, within the vernacular English literature of the fourteenth century, the response to the disease appears muted, particularly compared to contemporaneous descriptions emerging from mainland Europe.
Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England asks why one of the singular historical traumas of the later Middle Ages appears to be evoked so fleetingly in fourteenth-century Middle English poetry, a body of work as daring and socially engaged as any in English literary history. By focusing on under-recognized pestilential discourses in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—the four poems uniquely preserved British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x —this study resists the idea that the Black Death had only a slight impact on medieval English literature, and it strives to account for the understated shape of England’s literary response to the plague and our contemporary understandings of it.
 

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the “art of holy attention.”

If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. Marno shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, Marno illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.

In Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative, Matthew Clark and James Phelan provide a model of lively, sharp, and good-natured scholarly exchange. Clark proposes “friendly amendments” to Phelan’s theorizing  of the synthetic, mimetic, and thematic aspects of narrative, and Phelan responds, often by explaining why he finds Clark’s amendments less-than-friendly. Clark rounds off the debate by offering a brief rejoinder. Clark and Phelan consistently ground their theoretical arguments in their analyses of particular narratives, drawing on a corpus that ranges from Homer’s Iliad to Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army and includes, among many others, Jane Austen’s Emma, George Orwell’s 1984, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 
Clark and Phelan’s deep dive into the synthetic, mimetic, and thematic leads them to explore many other aspects of narrative and narrative theory: style, audiences, the mimetic illusion, fictionality, and more. Their investigation also leads them into questions about rhetorical narratology’s relation to other projects in narrative theory, especially unnatural narratology, and, indeed, about how to assess the explanatory power of competing theories. Ultimately, their debate is compelling testimony about the power of both narrative theory and narrative itself.
 

England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.

Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts.

Suzanne M. Waldman views well-known poems and artworks such as Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel and Venus Verticordia in new ways that expose their authors’ savvy anticipation of concepts that would come to be known as narcissism, fetishism, and the symbolic and imaginary orders, among many others. Waldman makes a strong case for the particular psychoanalytic importance of the Rossettis by looking at how the two Rossetti siblings’ own psyches were divided by conflicts between the period’s religious scruples and its taste for gothic sensationalism.

The Demon and the Damozel is a close and contextualized reading of their writings and artwork that displays, for the first time, continuity between the medieval cosmologies these Pre-Raphaelites drew upon and the psychoanalytic theories they looked ahead to—and locates the intricate patterns of proto-psychoanalytic understanding in the rich tapestry of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism.

This is an essential volume, and there’s no scholar better equipped to edit it than Elizabeth Heale, whose expertise on early women’s writing in manuscript is unsurpassed. The Devonshire Manuscript is a vital source of Tudor literary history, illustrating the circulation of lyrics by Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, and offering evidence of collaborative forms of production and circulation that challenge prior assumptions about early forms of authorship, readership, and literary culture more broadly. Yet despite its importance, the Devonshire Manuscript has been all but inaccessible until now. With its extensive notes, thoughtful introduction, and carefully edited text, Heale’s edition will be a valuable reference work for scholars as well as an important textbook for students encountering the Devonshire Manuscript for the first time.
—Jennifer Summit
Professor of English, Stanford University

Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body,” a fiction that holds that an abled body is one which does not participate in or situate experience.  The diaphanous abled body underwrites the myth that abled and disabled constitute two distinct categories of being rather than points on a constantly shifting continuum.

In any system of marginalization, the dominant identity always sets itself up as epistemologically and experientially superior to whichever group it separates itself from. Indeed, the norm is always most powerful when it is understood as an empty category or a view from nowhere. Diaphanous Bodies explores the phantom body that underwrites the artificial dichotomy between abled and disabled, upon which the representation of embodied experience depends.

 

Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways.

At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed’s well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating.

This volume collects for the first time all of Charles Dickens' extant plans and notes for his novels. Dickens wrote his novels in segments during the course of serial publication. Beginning with Dombey and Son, the sixth novel, he wrote out plans for each segment as he went along, sketching future developments, querying himself about options, noting motifs, establishing recurrent images, working out chronologies, experimenting with names, and, in general, reminding himself of what he had done and what he should do next. Some notes survive from before Dombey and those for a few novels after that are incomplete or abbreviated, but for the most part the plan from Dombey on are full and complete. Each sheet of these notes is reproduced here in actual-size photographic facsimile and is transcribed on the facing page in typographic facsimile, a format that preserves Dickens' holographic nuances and at the same time allows for the instant decipherment of his often difficult hand. Included are his plans for The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood. The volume also contains thirty-three full-page illustrations and a full-color frontispiece.

Harry Stone, an internationally recognized Dickens scholar, provides the reader with a full account of Dickens' methods of planning and working. In a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes, he uses Dickens' written plans to illuminate the thought and technique of the novels. He examines creative concerns, such as Dickens' process of naming and visualization, and technical matters, such as his use of various pen nibs, ink colors, and papers.

By making fully available and comprehensible Dickens' own cache of in-process plans, possibilities, and alternatives for shaping his novels, Dickens' Working Notes offers unparalleled insights into the novelist's art and into the nature of the creative imagination.

Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence by Andrew Mangham is one of the first studies to bring the medical humanities to bear on the work of Dickens. Turning to the field of forensic medicine (or medical jurisprudence), Mangham uncovers legal and medical contexts for Dickens’s ideas that result in new readings of novels, short stories, and journalism by this major Victorian author. Dickens’s Forensic Realism argues that the rich and unstable nature of truth and representation in Dickens owes much to the ideas and strategies of a forensic Victorian age, obsessed with questioning the relationship between clues and truths, evidences and answers.
                       
As Mangham shows, forensic medicine grew out of a perceived need to understand things with accuracy, leaning in part on the range of objectivities that inspired the inorganic sciences. At the same time, it had the burden of assisting the law in convicting the guilty and in exonerating the innocent. Practitioners of forensic medicine were uniquely mindful of unwanted variables such as human error and the vagaries of interpretation. In readings of Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and Dickens’s early journalism, Mangham demonstrates that these questions about signification, perception, and reality are central to the stylistic complexities and playful tone often associated with Dickens. Moreover, the medico-legal context of Dickens’s fiction illuminates the richness and profundity, style and impact of Dicken’s narratives.
 

A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost
interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God--among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense--and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance.
 

In this book, the first edition of which was published in 1971 by Oxford University Press, Ihab Hassan takes Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as his metaphor for a radical crisis in art and language, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. The modern Orpheus, he writes, “sings on a lyre without strings.” Thus, his sensitive critique traces a hypothetical line from Sade through four modern authors—Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett—to a literature still to come. But the line also breaks into two Interludes, one concerning ’Pataphysics, Dada, and Surrealism, and the other concerning Existentialism and Aliterature.
    Combining literary history, brief biography, and critical analysis, Hassan surrounds these authors with a complement of avant-garde writers whose works also foreshadow the postmodern temper. These include Jarry, Apollinaire, Tzara, Breton, Sartre, Camus, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and in America, Cage, Salinger, Ginsberg, Barth, and Burroughs. Hassan takes account also of related contemporary developments in art, music, and philosophy, and of many works of literary theory and criticism.
    For this new edition, Hassan has added a new preface and postface on the developing character of postmodernism, a concept which has gained currency since the first edition of this work, and which he himself has done much to theorize.

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

Long neglected by the academic world because of her rejection of belletristic values and resistance to convenient literary taxonomy, Doris Lessing has nonetheless built an international following of serious, dedicated readers. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by the multiple dimensions of Lessing’s work, Kaplan and Rose have gathered eleven essays that address her artistic, philosophical, political, and psychological complexity, and so provide a welcome introduction to the extraordinary depth and diversity of this important contemporary novelist.

Lessing has been described as an “alchemical” writer, in that her work is directed toward changing people’s lives and perceptions rather than simply recording experience. Accordingly, the contributors examine her various postures and tactics for the purpose of discovering how the alchemical elements inform her various personae. Frederick C. Stern discusses Lessing’s commitment to radical humanist thought, while Carey Kaplan examines how Lessing’s imperialist past has shaped her futuristic fiction. Elizabeth Abel offers a feminist interpretation of the pattern of brother-sister incest in Lessing’s work, showing how Lessing has established Antigone as a female alternative to the Oedipal myth of male incest. Particularly insightful is Eve Bertelsen’s report of her interview with Lessing, demonstrating how Lessing’s often evasive style of adversarial dialogue works in concert with her refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed by academic analysis.

For those readers new to her work, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival will serve as a useful introduction to Lessing’s concerns and techniques. Those who have long admired her writing will find in this collection new keys to understanding Lessing’s philosophical, political, and psychological complexity.

Since the first installment of Dunnett’s series was published in 1961, Francis Crawford of Lymond, the swashbuckling protagonist of the stories, has been captivating his fellow characters and readers alike. Instead of approaching the books primarily as historical fiction, Richardson, an enthusiastic admirer of the series, unravels the complexities of the main character by exploring his psychology, positioning the books within the genre of espionage, and examining Dunnett’s strategy of using games in her writing. Richardson’s insight and passion for his subject will inspire fans to revisit Dunnett’s series.

Dracula's Crypt unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, offering a fresh interpretation of the author's relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that consumes its characters.
 
An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelgänger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader.
 
Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives. Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as a vehicle of identity.
 
Revealing a profound and heretofore unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.
 

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question.

Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences.

Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.

In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.

Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley

With the inaugural edition of the Early Modern Drama Texts series, Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith illuminate the only surviving work of playwright and actor Thomas Drue. First performed by the Palsgrave’s Men at the Fortune Theater in 1624, The Duchess of Suffolk dramatizes the exile of Protestant noblewoman Katherine Willoughby (1519–80) during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I (1516–58). Drawing from popular accounts in works by John Foxe and Thomas Deloney, Drue created a narrative of exaggerated peril, as the Duchess and her companions are chased across the continent. The embellished history evokes many iconic figures of the Reformation, from the celebrated Oxford Martyrs Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, and Nicholas Ridley to Bishop Edmund Bonner, whose infamous reputation had earned him the soubriqet “bloody Bonner.” A tragicomic history, The Duchess of Suffolk still resonated when it was written and performed in early seventeenth-century England some seventy years later.
 
With this volume, Dutton and Galbraith provide a critical apparatus that situates The Duchess of Suffolk in historical context and suggests an explanation for its continued resonance. They account for the play’s censorship in 1624 by detailing how it evoked contemporary parallels to the controversial foreign policy of King James I. More specifically, the editors offer an introduction that includes a historical overview of the author, staging, printing, and reception. Facing facsimiles of the original are pages with the updated text, complete with annotations to clarify language and staging details. This edition of The Duchess of Suffolk will have something to offer to early modern drama scholars as well as scholars of book history.

"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada

In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century?

Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die.

Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.

This first full-scale treatment of the early prose of Dylan Thomas demonstrates the unity of his total work. Pratt argues that the inward journey of the poetic imagination which is implicit in poetry is often explicit in prose. Her study of Thomas’ early prose alongside his early poetry helps to elucidate all of his writing.
Pratt includes three appendices:  a chronology, a summary of the critics’ attitudes toward the problem of influence, and a bibliographical sketch of materials in the Parris surrealist magazine transition, which are paralleled in Thomas’ prose.