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The three essays constituting this volume were originally published as individual pamphlets by the Field Day Theatre Company, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Each deals with the question of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding and analyzing the aftermath of colonization. The authors’ diverse perspectives are demonstrated by the essays’ respective titles: Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment; Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism; and Said, Yeats and Decolonization. The essays have implication beyond their immediate topics, bearing upon questions of feminism, decolonization, and modernism to illuminate problems that belong to other groups and regions.

A compelling reclamation of the place of aesthetics in postcolonial literature

Literature though it may be, postcolonial literature is studied and understood largely—and often solely—in social and political terms. In neglecting its aesthetic dimension, as this book forcefully demonstrates, we are overlooking not only an essential aspect of this literature but even a critical perspective on its sociopolitical function and value. In Native Intelligence, Deepika Bahri focuses on postcolonial literature’s formal and aesthetic negotiations with sociopolitical concerns.

Ninety-six letters to the Tatler and the Spectator, representing what is probably the largest extant body of unpublished material relating directly to the two journals, appeared for the first time in print in this book.

The original letters were not published in the Tatler or the Spectator, but they were preserved by the editors and eventually found their way into the Marlborough and the Tickell collections. They have been prepared for publication and edited, with notes and an introduction, by an authority in the field of early periodicals.

The letters will be of especial interest to students of early eighteenth-century England, for few literary forms more clearly reflect the times in which they are written than the letter, particularly the letter to the editor. A wide range of writers is represented—the inarticulate and the witty, the serving maid and the gentleman. Subject matter is equally diverse, including such topics as women's petticoats, free thinking, the state lottery, the nuisance of a smoking wife, cock-throwing, and Platonic love.

Why the letters were not published in the Tatler or the Spectator is a matter for conjecture. Some of them were apparently used by Addison or Steele as topics for essays. Occasionally a letter was received or rewritten by the editors and printed in an altered form. Whatever the reason for their survival, these letters will be of value to students of language and literary journalism, social conditions, and popular philosophy.

A study of the popular but forgotten poetry published in eighteenth-century English newspapers and their overlooked influence on the canonical work from the period.

The first book-length study of its kind, Newspaper Verse focuses on poetry published in English-language newspapers during the long eighteenth century, including odes, couplets, news poems, ballads, and elegies by such famous poets as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Carter, and Thomas Gray and also verse by lesser-known or anonymous writers. For John O’Brien, these texts constitute something like the dark matter of eighteenth-century letters: the most widely read poetry in the period and yet unincorporated into existing narratives of eighteenth-century English literature. By engaging with these forgotten poems, O’Brien demonstrates how popular media enabled poetry to thrive and recovers their rich influence on the shape of English literary history.

A collection of field-defining essays on the Victorian novel, taking up a fascinating paradox in literary history: why do we care so deeply about fictional characters who don’t really exist?

n Nobody Comes of Age, Catherine Gallagher explores the Victorian novel by examining its most fundamental building block: the fictional character. Gallagher argues that “Nobodies”—nonreferential, yet realistic, invented personae, usually of middling social status—were the very engine of the genre’s development. Having arrived on the fictional scene in the eighteenth century, Nobody came of age during the Victorian era. The novel achieved cultural hegemony, and Victorian novelists explored these characters’ fictionality in tandem with the great intellectual developments of their time. Readers, knowing well that novel personae were not portraits of actual individuals, nevertheless expected them to yield important insights into the social and cultural changes of the age.

Nobody Comes of Age gathers in revised form a selection of Catherine Gallagher’s classic and still influential essays on the Victorian novel. These essays take up topics such as the relationship between fiction and the decline of religious belief in the period, and how novelists worked the tension between characters who seemed typical and plots that were unpredictable. Gallagher expertly navigates across a range of canonical texts, from the ordinary outcomes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to the archetypal sacrifices in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. For scholars and students of nineteenth-century British literature, Nobody Comes of Age is an essential companion.

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.

Over the course of his career, British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) shifted away from elitist social satires and an atheistic outlook toward greater concern for the masses and the use of religious terms and imagery. This change in Huxley's thinking underlies the previously unpublished play Now More Than Ever.

Written in 1932-1933 just after Brave New World, Now More Than Ever is a response to the social, economic, and political upheavals of its time. Huxley's protagonist is an idealistic financier whose grandiose schemes for controlling the means of production drive him to swindling and finally to suicide. His fate allows Huxley to expose the evils he perceives in free-market capitalism while pleading the case for national economic planning and the rationalization of Britain's industrial base.

This volume contains the full text of Now More Than Ever, which was believed to be lost until 1976, when a copy was found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A "thinker's play" that has never been produced on stage, it is the last previously unpublished piece of Huxley's major writings and immensely important to understanding his development as a writer. The editors of this volume have annotated the play for contemporary readers. Their introduction sets the play in the context of Huxley's intellectual life.