Harvey Kaye
Temple University Press, 1990
Jennifer Phegley
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics.
While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women’s unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper’s), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women’s reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively.
Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers, but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.

JULIA DAVIS
West Virginia University Press, 1992
Patricia A. Vertinsky
University of Illinois Press, 1994
Bronka Schneider Edited with forewords by Erika Bourguignon and Barbara Hill Rigney
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.
Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.
The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.
Martin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Edited by Margot Finn and Kate Smith
University College London, 2018

Till Düppe and Ivan Boldyrev, issue editors
Duke University Press, 0
Edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport
The Ohio State University Press, 2013

R. P. Sturges
Duke University Press, 1975
Peter Wilby
Haus Publishing, 2006
Stephen Howard Browne
University of Alabama Press, 2007
"A major accomplishment in the study of Burke." —Choice
More than 200 years after his death, Edmund Burke remains among the most influential conservative writers in the Anglophone world. Burke’s relevance has only grown as the nature of what it means to be a conservative has become hotly contested.
And yet Burke is often discussed more than he is read. Worse, his rhetoric is often pressed into the service of other ideologies. In Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue, Stephen Browne of Pennsylvania State University subjects Burke’s work to the close textual analysis it has never received.
The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the link between rhetoric and action that is key to understanding Burke, his career, his work, and his influence on contemporary conservatism.
Readers interested in the development of conversative philosophy, politics, and writing from its earliest roots will value this rare and illuminating work.
Laura Morgan Green
Ohio University Press, 2001
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines students, teachers, and frustrated scholars—at the center of their books. Educating Women analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual and professional achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals and by the forging of social rather than institutional ties.
Focusing on works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anna Leonowens, and Thomas Hardy, Laura Morgan Green demonstrates that those texts are shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education, on the one hand, and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity, on the other. Educating Women shows that the nineteenth-century “heroines” of both history and fiction were in fact as indebted to domestic ideology as they were eager to transform it.
William Shakespeare
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2022

Janice Hubbard Harris
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Much as abortion in the United States today is a contentious issue used for scripting women's roles and potential into the national agenda, divorce was an issue dividing England in the Edwardian era. According to Janice Harris, anything and everything, from illicit sex and family values to the Garden of Eden, wrath of children, poverty of women, nature of cruelty, scandal of America, threat of Germany, and future of England were part of the debate over divorce. Living under marriage laws far more restrictive than those of their Protestant neighbors, Edwardian women and men campaigned for reform with a barrage of compelling stories. Organizing her analysis around three major sources of narrative on divorce––the Sunday papers, the Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial causes, and the novel––Harris uncovers a war of words and a competition of tales. In raising questions about the winners, losers, and spoils, Harris expands our understanding of the history of divorce, the wars between the sexes, and the political import of those wars.
In the end, she presents a complex and lively story herself, one that illuminates battles over marriage and divorce taking place in our own era as well. This humane book on a long-neglected subject marks an important contribution to narrative studies and Edwardian history.
Howard D. Weinbrot
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Eighteenth-Century Contexts offers a lively array of essays that consider literary, intellectual, political, theological, and cultural aspects of the years 1650–1800, in the British Isles and Europe. At the center of the book is Jonathan Swift; several essays delve into his poetry, his similarities to Bernard Mandeville, his response to Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, and the relationship between his Gulliver’s Travels and Thomas More’s Utopia. Other essays discuss Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century music and poetry, William Congreve, James Boswell, Samuel Richardson, and women’s novels of the eighteenth century.
Edited by William W. Kibler
University of Texas Press, 1976
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England, and the mother of two others, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. In her eventful, often stormy life, she not only influenced the course of events in the twelfth century but also encouraged remarkable advances in the literary and fine arts. In this book, experts in five disciplines—history, art history, music, French and English literature—evaluate the influence of Eleanor and her court on history and the arts.
Elizabeth A. R. Brown views Eleanor as having played a significant role as parent and politician, but not as patron. Rebecca A. Baltzer takes a new look at the music of the period that was written by and for Eleanor, her court, and her family. Moshé Lazar reexamines her relationship to the courtly-love literature of the period. Eleanor S. Greenhill and Larry M. Ayres reassess her influence in the realm of art history. Rossell Hope Robbins traces the lines extending from the French courtly literature of Eleanor's period down into fourteenth-century Chaucerian England. The essays reflect divergent but generally complementary assessments of this remarkable woman's influence on her own era and on future times as well.
This volume is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas in 1973.
Jason Rudy
Ohio University Press, 2009
Michael C. Duffy
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng
University of London Press, 2021
Dorothy Mermin
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Edited by Jessica Edmondes
Iter Press, 2022
Leonard R. N. Ashley
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Malcolm J. Turnbull
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
Peter Cain
St. Augustine's Press, 1999
The 1870s is a key decade in the evolution of British thinking about the nature, purpose, and future of empire. Increasing economic competition began to disturb the complacent assumption about Britain's leadership in technology and in the world economy. The growth of other countries, most notably the United States and Germany, put in question Britain's survival as a great power. These changes set in motion a reappraisal of Britain's empire and its importance to the motherland, and a heated debated as to whether colonialism and imperialism were a burden rather than a benefit to Britain. The discussion of the 1870s set the agenda for the debates of the next half-century. This volume documents the writing central to the debate; it includes contributions by such leading British thinkers and statesmen as J. A. Froude, Robert Lowe, Edward Dicey, Frederic Seebohm, Lord Carnarvon, Gladstone, Julius Vogel, and Lord Blachford.
Antoinette Burton
Duke University Press, 2011
Christopher Taylor
Duke University Press, 2018
David Chidester
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger
Reaktion Books, 2015
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Pluto Press, 2021
Schlueter, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 1999
David McDermott Hughes
Duke University Press, 2017

Ib Bondebjerg
Intellect Books, 2014
Christopher Tyerman
University of Chicago Press, 1988

James Chandler
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Su Fang Ng
University of Delaware Press, 2022

Mike Wayne
Pluto Press, 2018
Marc W. Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Mary Clayton
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017
ISAS Dublin 2013. England, Ireland and the Insular World: Textual and Material Connections in the Early Middle Ages is a collection of twelve essays related to the theme of the 2013 conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, ‘Insular Cultures’. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, from early medieval agriculture in Ireland and England, to sculpture, manuscript illumination and script, homilies, hagiography, aristocratic gift-giving, relics, calendars, Beowulf, and Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the Celtic peoples, considering connections, parallels and differences between Anglo-Saxon England and its insular neighbors. The volume will be of interest to all those working on Early Medieval history, literature, archaeology, liturgy, art, and manuscripts.
James L. Hevia
Duke University Press, 2003
Hevia analyzes British Foreign Office documents, diplomatic memoirs, auction house and museum records, nineteenth-century scholarly analyses of Chinese history and culture, campaign records, and photographs. He shows how Britain refigured its imperial project in
China as a cultural endeavor through examinations of the circulation of military loot in Europe, the creation of an art history of “things Chinese,” the construction of a field of knowledge about China, and the Great Game rivalry between Britain, Russia, and the Qing empire in Central Asia. In so doing, he illuminates the impact of these elements on the colonial project and the creation of a national consciousness in China.
Eric Saylor
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Wrightson, Keith
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Tony Ballantyne
Duke University Press, 2015
Diana K. Davis
Ohio University Press, 2011
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV
Edited by Marshall C. Eakin and Paulo Roberto de Almeida
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
Envisioning Brazil is a comprehensive and sweeping assessment of Brazilian studies in the United States. Focusing on synthesis and interpretation and assessing trends and perspectives, this reference work provides an overview of the writings on Brazil by United States scholars since 1945.
"The Development of Brazilian Studies in the United States," provides an overview of Brazilian Studies in North American universities. "Perspectives from the Disciplines" surveys the various academic disciplines that cultivate Brazilian studies: Portuguese language studies, Brazilian literature, art, music, history, anthropology, Amazonian ethnology, economics, politics, and sociology. "Counterpoints: Brazilian Studies in Britain and France" places the contributions of U.S. scholars in an international perspective. "Bibliographic and Reference Sources" offers a chronology of key publications, an essay on the impact of the digital age on Brazilian sources, and a selective bibliography.