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Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination
Anglophone Writing from 1600 to 1900
Silke Stroh
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.” Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands, which also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. Silke Stroh shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism.
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Garden Theology
Seán Mac Falls
Tupelo Press, 2022
The great tradition of Irish poetry courses through Seán Mac Falls’ blood and into his lines, as if he has spent a lifetime inhaling the sea breezes, cliffs, and peat bogs, ennobled from William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland. Here in a generous volume is a stunning treasury of pleasures, direct and appealing in voice, earthbound and empyrean in spirit, epistemological and rare.
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Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature
Mary Beth Rose
University of Chicago Press, 2001
For most readers and spectators, heroism takes the form of public, idealized masculinity. It calls to mind socially and morally elevated men embarking on active adventures: courageously confronting danger; valiantly rescuing the helpless; exploring and claiming unconquered terrain. But in this book, Mary Beth Rose argues that from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, a passive, more female, but equally potent dimension of heroic identity began to dominate English culture. For both men and women, heroism came to be defined in terms of patience, as the ability to endure suffering, catastrophe, and pain.

Interweaving discourses of gender, Rose explores ways in which this heroics of endurance became the dominant model. She examines the glamorous, failed destinies of heroes in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe; Elizabeth I's creation of a heroic identity in her public speeches; the autobiographies of four ordinary women thrust into the public sphere by civil war; and the seduction of heroes into slavery in works by Milton, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Ultimately, her study demonstrates the importance of the female in the creation of modern heroism, while offering a critique of both idealized action and suffering.
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Gender and Position-Taking in Henrician Verse
Tradition, Translation, and Transcription
Rebecca Quoss-Moore
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Tradition, translation, and transcription in Henrician verse functioned together in systems of communally created, coded position-taking. Understanding this system as an extensive network of production and reception in which women took on many roles allows for new readings of Henrician verse that emphasize the interpretive range available to contemporary reading and writing communities. This restoration demasculinizes our approach to Henrician verse not only through a more equitable consideration of gender’s functions in that social world, but also in de-emphasizing individualized self-fashioning or authorial intent in favor of an engagement with communal production and shared sociopolitical engagement. The creation in this system is not of a code, but of systems for coding and recognizing position-taking. These communal systems offer a site for the intersection of reader and writer, of transcriber and composer, and of King and courtier in a space that questions, creates, and troubles power in the Henrician court.
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A Genealogy of the Gentleman
Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century
Mary Beth Harris
University of Delaware Press, 2024
A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their narrative constructions of the gentleman. It challenges two latent critical assumptions: first, that the gentleman’s masculinity is normative, private, and therefore oppositional to concepts of performance; and second, that women writers, from their disadvantaged position within a patriarchal society, had no real means of influencing dominant structures of masculinity. By placing writers such as Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author—Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Richardson—Mary Beth Harris shows how these women carved out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and appeal were dependent on women’s influence. Ultimately, this project considers the import of these women writers’ legacy, both progressive and conservative, on hegemonic standards of masculinity that persist to this day.
 
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Genres of the Credit Economy
Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain
Mary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 2008
How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money—in other words, participating in the modern financial system—come to seem likeroutine activities of everydaylife? Genres of the Credit Economy addressesthis question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
Chronicling the process by which some of our most important conceptual categories were naturalized, Mary Poovey explores complex relationships among forms of writing that are not usually viewed together, from bills of exchange and bank checks, to realist novels and Romantic poems, to economic theory and financial journalism. Taking up all early forms of financial and monetarywriting, Poovey argues that these genres mediated for early modern Britons the operations of a market system organized around credit and debt. By arguing that genre is a critical tool for historical and theoretical analysis and an agent in the events that formed the modern world, Poovey offers a new way to appreciate the character of the credit economy and demonstrates the contribution historians and literary scholars can make to understanding its operations.
Much more than an exploration of writing on and around money, Genres of the Credit Economy offers startling insights about the evolution of disciplines and the separation of factual and fictional genres.
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Gentle Flame
The Life and Verse of Dudley, Fourth Lord North
Dale B. J. Randall
Duke University Press, 1983
Gentle Flame recounts the life and presents for the first time the hitherto unknown poetry of Dudley, Fourth Lord North. Born during the reign of Elizabeth I, reared in that of James I, elected to Parliament under Charles I, and retired to his country seat during the time of Charles II, the life an poetry of the Fourth Lord North deepens present-day understanding of an age that saw much social change.
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The Geometry of Modernism
The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats
By Miranda B. Hickman
University of Texas Press, 2006

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work.

Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

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George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation
Alan Mintz
Harvard University Press, 1978

Alan Mintz has discovered a new sub-genre of fiction: the novel of vocation. In the nineteenth century, he maintains, work ceased to be merely what one did for a living or out of a sense of duty and became a vehicle for self-definition and self-realization. The change was prepared for by the growth of professions and the increase in middle-class career opportunities. He shows how George Eliot, in particular, linked these new social possibilities to the older Puritan doctrine of calling or vocation, achieving in her late novels a fictional structure that could encompass the conflicting energies of the age. In the idea of vocation she found a way to explore how far it is possible to be ambitious both for oneself and for a large cause, and a way to probe the contradictions between ambitious, self-defining work and the older institutions of family, community, and religion.

The book is solidly grounded in cultural and historical reality. Although Mintz concentrates on George Eliot and especially Middlemarch, he also examines the conceptions of self and work in Victorian biographies and autobiographies and the emergence in late-nineteenth-century fiction of the idea of the vocation of art.

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GEORGE ELIOT S SERIAL FICTION
Carol A Martin
The Ohio State University Press, 1994

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George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton
Anna K. Nardo
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In George Eliot’s Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton’s life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton’s poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life—transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told.
In Romola and Middlemarch, Eliot’s contemporary audience would immediately have recognized in her heroines’ stories the plight of Milton’s daughters—enlisted as readers for a blind poet and scholar. By evoking the well-known legends of Milton’s life in these novels, Eliot places Milton in dialogue with himself in order to imagine new possibilities. In Romola, a daughter uses what she has learned from one Miltonic father to liberate herself from subjugation to the other, and in Middlemarch, Eliot tests Milton’s fundamental assumptions about gender and knowledge by evoking, then reframing scenes from his life and his epic Paradise Lost.
This strategy for establishing a dialogue with authoritative discourse, which Eliot evolved in midcareer, is complex and elegant. Eliot’s first full-length novel, however, poses a direct challenge to the pastoral assumptions of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”—a challenge that she extends to the theology of Milton’s epic of a lost pastoral paradise. In Adam Bede, Eliot summons Miltonic patterns into situations that expose their absence, leaving not the denial of these patterns, but their echo. Having separated Milton’s characteristic patterns of choice from his theology, Eliot then began to experiment with transformations of the Miltonic hero. By reimagining the story of the virtuous Lady of Comus, Eliot discovers the possibility for a heroic deliverance for the beleaguered heroine of The Mill on the Floss. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, she first characterizes a male protagonist as a Miltonic hero, and then confronts her female, rather than her male, protagonist with the trials faced by that hero.
In these complex transformations, we see Eliot’s strenuous and lifelong dialogue with Milton—a dialogue that liberated Eliot’s imagination. The author shows that Eliot opens the authoritative discourse by and about Milton to new possibilities envisioned by a towering female intellect. Scholars of both seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature, especially those specializing in Eliot or Milton, as well as theorists engaged in the ongoing debate about intertextuality, will find this book of great interest.
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George Eliot's Religious Imagination
A Theopoetics of Evolution
Marilyn Orr
Northwestern University Press, 2018
George Eliot's Religious Imagination addresses the much-discussed question of Eliot’s relation to Christianity in the wake of the sociocultural revolution triggered by the spread of theories of evolution. The standard view is that the author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner “lost her faith” at this time of religious crisis. Orr argues for a more nuanced understanding of the continuity of Eliot’s work, as one not shattered by science, but shaped by its influence.

Orr’s wide-ranging and fascinating analysis situates George Eliot in the fertile intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, among thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Søren Kierkegaard. She also argues for a connection between George Eliot and the twentieth-century evolutionary Christian thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her analysis draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney as well as writers on mysticism, particularly Karl Rahner.

The book takes an original look at questions many believe settled, encouraging readers to revisit George Eliot’s work. Orr illuminates the creative tension that still exists between science and religion, a tension made fruitful through the exercise of the imagination. Through close readings of Eliot's writings, Orr demonstrates how deeply the novelist's religious imagination continued to operate in her fiction and poetry.
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George Henry Lewes
A Victorian Mind
Hock Guan Tjoa
Harvard University Press, 1977
George Henry Lewes, consort of George Eliot biographer of Robespierre and Goethe, novelist, editor, and critic, was also a scientist and philosopher. An intellectual figure of great importance on the Victorian scene, he has never before received adequate modern scholarly appreciation. In this book Professor Tjoa not only reconstructs Lewes’ theory of criticism and his social and political opinions but also evaluates his contributions to Darwinian science both as original thinker and as popularizer. With skillful discrimination, moreover, Mr. Tjoa has extracted from Lewes’ massive five-volume Problems of Life and Mind a clear and succinct account of Lewes’ metaphysical views. Literature and art, politics and societs science and an in- formed Victorian philosophy of man and the universe: the effervescent Lewes made important contributions to all. Hitherto in danger of surviving in our minds only as the lover, friend, and counselor of one of the Victorian age’s greatest novelists, Lewes emerges in Mr. Ijoa’s brief and lucid study as a thinker to he remembered for his writings as well.
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Germaine De Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist
Linda M. Lewis
University of Missouri Press, 2003
By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Staël and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Staël’s Corinne and Sand’s Consuelo combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil’s Sibyl, and Dante’s Beatrice. Lewis illustrates how the resulting Corinne/Consuelo effect is exhibited in scores of English artist-as-heroine narratives, particularly in the works of these four prominent writers who most consciously and elaborately allude to the French literary matriarchs.
            In her initial chapter, Lewis explains Corinne’s gift as “l’enthousiasme” and Consuelo’s as “la flamme sacrée. Corinne uses her influence as a political Sibyl to enter the debates of the Napoleonic era; Consuelo employs her sacred fire as a divine Sophia to indict injustice throughout Europe. Subsequent chapters examine the public and private voices of the Sibyls and Sophias of Victorian fiction, as well as the degree to which their gift demands service to art, to God, and to humankind. The closing chapter studies the waning influence of Staël and Sand in the fin-de-siècle “New Woman” novel.
The core of Lewis’s book is its treatment of the Victorian author and her feminine aesthetics. In each chapter Lewis uncovers the references to Corinne and Consuelo—subtle or overt, serious or facetious—and reveals the resulting tension when an artist invokes a foremother but avoids merging with the mother whom she emulates. The methodology of this bookincludes myth criticism, feminist commentary, and psychoanalytic theory, but its strength lies in Lewis’s close reading of the intertextuality of ten literary works.
Exploring a connection between French and English literature and providing fresh insight, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist makes a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism.
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The Global Wordsworth
Romanticism Out of Place
Bergren, Katherine
Bucknell University Press, 2019
The Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth’s poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth’s afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own—and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception—critical, appreciative, and ambivalent—inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Glorious Bodies
Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature
Colby Gordon
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.
 
In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
 
In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
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Gondal's Queen
A Novel in Verse
By Emily Jane Brontë
University of Texas Press, 1955

In Gondal’s Queen, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford presents a cycle of eighty-four poems by Emily Jane Brontë, for the first time arranged in logical sequence, to re-create the “novel in verse” which Emily wrote about their beloved mystical kingdom of Gondal and its ruler, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, who brought tragedy to those who loved her.

Thanks to previous publications by Ratchford, the imaginative world of Gondal is well known not only to Brontë scholars but also to general readers. Only in the present book, however, with Emily’s lovely poems restored to the setting which gave them being, can the full impact of this extraordinary literary creation be realized.

The life story of Gondal’s Queen, from portentous birth to tragic death, is set in a world compounded of dark Gothic romance and Byronic extravagance; yet out of it emerges not only a real country of wild moor sheep and piercingly beautiful nights but also the portrait of a real woman, whose doom was wrought not by the stars but by the clashing complications of her own nature.

In A.G.A. (the appellation most usually applied to the Queen), Emily Brontë created a personality, not a puppet reciting lovely lines. And Ratchford, in reconstructing her story, has re-affirmed the dignity, beauty, and richness of Emily’s poetry.

Gondal’s Queen is the end of a long trail of research and literary detection which has led Ratchford to all known Brontë documentary sources. This quest was originally stimulated by curiosity over a tiny booklet signed, “C. Brontë, June 29th, 1837,” in the Wrenn Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Ratchford’s intense and astonishingly fruitful interest in the Brontës had its origin in her attempt to unravel the fascinating puzzle presented by this little book, which seemed to be merely a series of childish vignettes held together by “a shadow of a common character” and a “tendency toward a unified plot.”

Bit by bit, Ratchford assembled clues from manuscripts and obscure publications until the significance of the play world of the Brontë children began to emerge. In spite of the fact that the Brontës had been the subject of the liveliest literary speculation since their deaths, it remained for Ratchford to establish the importance of their juvenile writings to the later writings of Charlotte. In successive publications she presented the accumulating evidence. For a time her curiosity was centered on Charlotte and the group, but it finally became focused on Emily through a manuscript journal fragment which fortunately came to hand.

Unlike Charlotte, Emily left no prose works from her childhood. But it is apparent from journal entries and birthday notes written by Emily and Anne (whose shared creation Gondal was) not only that the two younger Brontës lived in and sustained daily an imaginary world which had evolved from the earlier play of the four children together, but also that they had written separately voluminous histories and “novels” about it. Of Emily’s vast Gondal literature, only a small body of verse has survived, poems originally intended for no eye but her own and possibly Anne’s. But it is clear that Gondal was not only Emily Brontë’s childhood dream world but also the major preoccupation of her adult creative life.

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The Good Brexiteers Guide to English Lit
John Sutherland
Reaktion Books, 2018
What is Nigel Farage’s favorite novel? Why do Brexiteers love Sherlock Holmes? Is Philip Larkin the best Brexit poet ever? Through the politically relevant sideroad of English Literature, writ large, John Sutherland quarries the great literary minds of English history to assemble the ultimate reading list for Brexiteers.

Brexit shook Britain to its roots and sent shockwaves across the world. But despite the referendum victory, Brexit is peculiarly hollow. It is an idea without political apparatus, without sustaining history, without field-tested ideology. As Sutherland argues: it is without thinkers—like Frankenstein waiting for the lightning bolt. In this irreverent, entertaining, and utterly tongue-in-cheek new guide, Sutherland suggests some stuffing for the ideological vacuity at the heart of the Brexit cause. He looks for meaning in the works of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy; in modern classics like The Queen and I and London Fields; and in the British national anthem, school songs, and poetry.

Exploring what Britain meant, means, and will mean, Sutherland subtly shows how great literary works have a shaping influence on the world. Witty and insightful, and with a preface by Guardian columnist and critic John Crace, this book belongs on the shelves of anyone seeking to understand the bragging Brexiteers (and the many diehard Remoaners, too).
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Good Words
Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel
Mark Knight
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
This new study explores how evangelicalism played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel. In contrast to those who see the evangelical movement as trivial to our histories of the novel and part of the losing side in religion’s battle with secularity, Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel examines fiction by major writers of the nineteenth century—Thackeray, Dickens, Wood, MacDonald, Collins, and Butler—and reveals the extent to which the novel was shaped by evangelical thought and practice.
Rather than getting lost in historical and theological rabbit holes, Good Words invites readers to think about why evangelicalism still matters for the stories we tell about fiction in the Victorian period. The result has major implications for our understanding of the Victorian novel, our conception of the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and religion, the way in which we think about evangelical culture in the modern world, and our ideas about the practices and protocols of scholarly reading.
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The Gothic Family Romance
Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order
Margot Gayle Backus
Duke University Press, 1999
Tales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. Such recurring tropes are examined in this pioneering study by Margot Gayle Backus to show how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children and later descendents of Protestant English settlers in Ireland.
Backus uses contemporary theory, including that of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to analyze texts by authors ranging from Richardson, Swift, Burke, Edgeworth, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary Irish novelists and playwrights.
By charting the changing relations between the family and the British state, she shows how these authors dramatized a legacy of violence within the family cell and discusses how disturbing themes of child sacrifice and colonial repression are portrayed through irony, satire, “paranoid” fantasy, and gothic romance. In a reconceptualization of the Freudian family romance, Backus argues that the figures of the Anglo-Irish gothic embody the particular residue of childhood experiences within a settler colonial society in which biological reproduction represented an economic and political imperative.
Backus’s bold positioning of the nuclear family at the center of post-Enlightenment class and colonial power relations in England and Ireland will challenge and provoke scholars in the fields of Irish literature and British and postcolonial studies. The book will also interest students and scholars of women’s studies, and it has important implications for understanding contemporary conflicts in Ireland.
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Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
Juliet Fleming
Reaktion Books, 2001

Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England.

            In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows.

            Moving beyond what has been preserved in print and manuscript, this book claims the whitewashed wall as the primary textual canvas of the early modern English, explores the tattooing practices of sixteenth-century Europeans, and uncovers the poetics of ceramic cookware. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England will provide a startling new perspective for scholars of early modern literature and cultural history.

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Graham R.
Rosamund Marriot Watson, Woman of Letters
Linda K. Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2005

Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siècle London and the way in which literary reputations are made—and lost. A participant in aestheticism and decadence, she wrote six volumes of poems noted for their subtle cadence, diction, and uncanny effects. Linda K. Hughes unfolds a complex life in Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, tracing the poet’s development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant-garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary modernism.

Despite an early first divorce, she won fame writing under a pseudonym, Graham R. Tomson. The influential Andrew Lang announced the arrival of a new poet he assumed to be a man. She was soon hosting a salon attended by Lang, Oscar Wilde, and other 1890s notables. Publishing to widespread praise as Graham R., she exemplified the complex cultural politics of her era. A woman with a man’s name and a scandalous past, she was also a graceful beauty who captivated Thomas Hardy and left an impression on his work. At the height of her success she fell in love with writer H. B. Marriott Watson and dared a second divorce.

Graham R. combines the stories of a gifted poet, of London literary networks in the 1890s, and of a bold woman whose achievements and scandals turned on her unusual history of marriage and divorce. Her literary history and her uncommon experience reveal the limits and opportunities faced by an unconventional, ambitious, and talented woman at the turn of the century.

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Grammars of Approach
Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque
Cynthia Wall
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it.  The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.
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The Grand Continuum
Reflections on Joyce and Metaphysics
David A. White
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983

The assumptions that literary criticism and philosophy are closely linked—and that both disciplines can learn much from each other—lead David White to examine key passages in James Joyce’s novels both as a philosopher and as literary critic.  In so doing, he develops a thesis that Joyce’s attempt to capture the mysterious process whereby perception and consciousness are translated into language entails a fundamental challenge to everyday notions of reality. Joyce’s stylistic brilliance and virtuosity, his destruction of normal syntax and meaning, “shock one into a new reality.” In the book’s final section, White examines the subtle relation between literary language and human consciousness and traces parallels between Joyce’s stylistic experimentation and Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s ideas about language.

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The Great William
Writers Reading Shakespeare
Theodore Leinwand
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters.

Theodore Leinwand builds impressively detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.
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Green Victorians
The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District
Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community.
           
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.
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A Grouped Frequency Word-List of Anglo-Saxon Poetry
John F. Madden and Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr.
Harvard University Press

front cover of Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Two Islands, Many Worlds
By Raymond D. Souza
University of Texas Press, 1996

A native Cuban who has lived in London since 1966, Guillermo Cabrera Infante is, in every sense, a multilingual and multicultural author. Equally at ease in both Spanish and English, he has distinguished himself with daring and innovative novels, essays, short stories, and film scripts written in both languages. His work has won major literary awards in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in the United States.

This biography is the first comprehensive exploration of the life and works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with the author and his family and friends, as well as extensive study of both published and unpublished works, Raymond D. Souza creates an intimate portrait of Cabrera Infante and the cultural and political milieus that shaped his writing, including Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres), View of Dawn in the Tropics (Vista del amanecer en el trópico), Infante's Inferno (La Habana para un Infante difunto), Holy Smoke, A Twentieth Century Job (Un oficio del siglo XX), Writes of Passage (Así en la paz como en la guerra), and Mea Cuba.

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