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1049 books match the query 'English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh' and 234 start with t

cover of T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide

T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide

David E. Chinitz

University of Chicago Press, 2003

The modernist poet T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced for decades as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it seemed. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide refurbishes this great writer for the twenty-first century, presenting him as the complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature but to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley.

David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays, was ambivalent rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz, for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest in popular culture both in such famous works as The Waste Land and in such lesser-known pieces as Sweeney Agonistes. And he traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap between high art and popular culture through a new type of public art: contemporary popular verse drama.

What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.
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cover of THE IMAGINATION OF CLASS: MASCULINITY AND THE VICTORIAN URBAN POOR

THE IMAGINATION OF CLASS

MASCULINITY AND THE VICTORIAN URBAN POOR

Dan Bivona and Roger B. Henkle

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

A fascinating meld of two scholars’ research and conclusions, The Imagination of Class is a synthetic journey through middle-class Victorian discourse posed by poverty in the midst of plenty—but not that alone. Rather Dan Bivona and Roger B. Henkle argue that the representation of abject poverty in the nineteenth century also displaced anxieties aroused by a variety of challenges to Victorian middle class masculinity. The book’s main argument, in fact, is that the male middle class imagery of urban poverty in the Victorian age presents a complex picture, one in which anxieties about competition, violence, class-based resentment, individuality, and the need to differentiate oneself from the scions of inherited wealth influence mightily the ways in which the urban poor are represented. In the representations themselves, the urban poor are alternately envisioned as sentimentalized (and feminized) victims who stimulate middle class affective response, as the objects of the professionalized discourses of the social sciences (and social services), and as an often hostile social force resistant to the “culturalizing,” taming processes of a maternalist social science.

Through carefully nuanced discussions of a variety of Victorian novelists, journalists, and sociological investigators (some well known, like Dickens, and others less well known, like Masterman and Greenwood), the book offers new insight into the role played by the imagination of the urban poor in the construction of Victorian middle class masculinity. Whereas many scholars have discussed the feminization of the poor, virtually no one has addressed how the poor have served as a site at which middle class men fashioned their own class and gender identity.
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cover of THE NOVEL AND THE MENAGERIE: TOTALITY, ENGLISHNESS, AND EMPIRE

THE NOVEL AND THE MENAGERIE

TOTALITY, ENGLISHNESS, AND EMPIRE

KURT KOENIGSBERGER

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

The first comprehensive account of the relation of collections of imperial beasts to narrative practices in England, The Novel and the Menagerie explores an array of imaginative responses to the empire as a dominant, shaping factor in English daily life. Kurt Koenigsberger argues that domestic English novels and collections of zoological exotica (especially zoos, circuses, traveling menageries, and colonial and imperial exhibitions) share important aesthetic strategies and cultural logics: novels about English daily life and displays featuring collections of exotic animals both strive to relate Englishness to a larger empire conceived as an integrated whole.
 
Koenigsberger’s investigations range from readings of novels by authors such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter to analyses of ballads, handbills, broadsides, and memoirs of showmen. Attending closely to the collective English practices of imagining and delineating the empire as a whole, The Novel and the Menagerie works at the juncture of literary criticism, colonial discourse studies, and cultural analysis to historicize the notion of totality in the theory and practice of the English novel. In exploring the shapes of the novel in England and of the English institutions that collected exotic animals, it offers fresh readings of familiar literary texts and opens up new ways of understanding the character of imperial Englishness across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England

Marisa Libbon

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

People in medieval England talked, and yet we seldom talk or write about their talk. People conversed not within literary texts, but in the world in which those texts were composed and copied. The absence of such talk from our record of the medieval past is strange. Its absence from our formulation of medieval literary history is stranger still. In Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, Marisa Libbon argues that talk among medieval England’s public, especially talk about history and identity, was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature. Examining Richard I’s life as an exemplary subject of medieval England’s class-crossing talk about the past, Libbon advances a theory of how talk circulates history, identity, and cultural memory over time. By identifying sites of local talk about England's past, from law courts to palace chambers, and tracing rumors about Richard that circulated during his life and long after his death, Libbon offers a literary history of Richard that accounts for the spaces between and around extant manuscript copies of Middle English romances like Richard Coeur de Lion, insular and Continental chronicles, and chansons de geste with figures such as Charlemagne and Roland. These spaces, usually dismissed as silent, tell us about the processes of writing and reading and illuminate the intangible daily life in which textual production occurred. In revealing the pressures that talk about the past exerted on textual production, this bookrelocates the power of making culture and collective memory to a wider, collaborative authorship in medieval England.
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cover of Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820

Technologies of Empire

Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820

Dermot Ryan

University of Delaware Press, 2013

Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but as a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces. Technologies of Empire reads the imagination as an instrument that works in tandem with writing, expanding and consolidating the networks of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction and Wordsworth’s epic poetry, this study offers a new account of writing’s role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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cover of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Telling Complexions

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Mary Ann O Farrell

Duke University Press, 1997

In Telling Complexions Mary Ann O’Farrell explores the frequent use of "the blush" in Victorian novels as a sign of characters’ inner emotions and desires. Through lively and textured readings of works by such writers as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, O’Farrell illuminates literature’s relation to the body and the body’s place in culture. In the process, she plots a trajectory for the nineteenth-century novel’s shift from the practices of manners to the mode of self-consciousness.
Although the blush was used to tell the truth of character and body, O’Farrell shows how it is actually undermined as a stable indicator of character in novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, North and South, and David Copperfield. She reveals how these writers then moved on in search of other bodily indicators of mortification and desire, among them the swoon, the scar, and the blunder. Providing unique and creative insights into the constructedness of the body and its semiotic play in literature and in culture, Telling Complexions includes parallel examples of the blush in contemporary culture and describes ways that textualized bodies are sometimes imagined to resist the constraints imposed by such construction.
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cover of Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry

Telling Rhythm

Body and Meaning in Poetry

Amittai Aviram

University of Michigan Press, 1994

In an era when poetry as a cultural force in the West appears to be waning, Telling Rhythm presents a hopeful and invigorating new approach to reading and interpreting poetry. At the same time, the book reviews a tradition of theorizing about poetry and suggests some innovations in literary theory itself that point to new ways of thinking about poetic texts.
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cover of Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785

Telling Time

Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785

Stuart Sherman

University of Chicago Press, 1997

A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In Telling Time, Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work.

Through brilliant readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily Spectator, the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose—the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments—within the cultural context of the daily institutions which gave it form and motion. Telling Time is not only a major accomplishment for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies, but it also makes important contributions to current discourse in cultural studies.
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cover of Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture

Textile Orientalisms

Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture

Suchitra Choudhury

Ohio University Press, 2023

The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire. During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories. Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies. The book’s distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury’s work points to a new direction in critical studies.
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cover of Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann

Textual Awareness

A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann

Dirk Van Hulle

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Aware of the act of writing as a temporal process, many modernist authors preserved numerous manuscripts of their works, which themselves thematized time. Textual Awareness analyzes the writing processes in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and relates these to Anglo-American, French, and German theories of text. By relating theory to practice, this comparative study reveals the links between literary and textual criticism.

A key issue in both textual criticism and the so-called crisis of the novel is the tension between the finished and the unfinished. After a theoretical examination of the relationship between genetic and textual criticism, Dirk Van Hulle uses the three case studies to show how?at each stage in the writing process?the text still had the potential of becoming something entirely different; how and why these geneses proceeded the way they did; how Joyce, Proust, and Mann allowed contingencies to shape their work; how these authors recycled the words of their critics in order to inoculate their works against them; how they shaped an intertextual dimension through the processing of source texts and reading notes; and how text continually generated more text.

Van Hulle's exploration of process sheds new light on the remarkable fact that so many modernist authors protected their manuscripts, implying both the authors' urge to grasp everything and their awareness of the dangers of their encyclopedic projects. Textual Awareness offers new insights into the artificiality of the artifact?the novel?that are relevant to the study of literary modernism in general and the study of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann in particular.

Dirk Van Hulle is Assistant Professor of English and German Literature, University of Antwerp.


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cover of Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England

Textual Magic

Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England

Katherine Storm Hindley

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An expansive consideration of charms as a deeply integrated aspect of the English Middle Ages.
 
Katherine Storm Hindley explores words at their most powerful: words that people expected would physically change the world. Medieval Europeans often resorted to the use of spoken or written charms to ensure health or fend off danger. Hindley draws on an unprecedented archive of more than a thousand such charms from medieval England—more than twice the number gathered, transcribed, and edited in previous studies and including many texts still unknown to specialists on this topic. Focusing on charms from 1100 to 1350 CE as well as previously unstudied texts in Latin, French, and English, Hindley addresses important questions of how people thought about language, belief, and power. She describes seven hundred years of dynamic, shifting cultural landscapes, where multiple languages, alphabets, and modes of transmission gained and lost their protective and healing power. Where previous scholarship has bemoaned a lack of continuity in the English charms, Hindley finds surprising links between languages and eras, all without losing sight of the extraordinary variety of the medieval charm tradition: a continuous, deeply rooted part of the English Middle Ages.
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cover of Thackeray: The Sentimental Cynic

Thackeray

The Sentimental Cynic

Lambert Ennis

Northwestern University Press, 1950

Thackeray: The Sentimental Cynic chronicles British novelist William Thackeray's ambivalent attitudes toward society and traces his conduct during the major crises of his life in terms of those attitudes. Lambert Ennis examines the emotional tensions in Thackeray’s life and the impact they had in his work. In so doing, he illustrates key themes in Victorian studies more broadly: the question of manners and taste and the relationship between sentimentality and authenticity, and the ways that sentimentality might shape morality.
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cover of The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

The Accommodated Animal

Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

Laurie Shannon

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.
 
With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
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cover of The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England

The Afterlife of Pope Joan

Deploying the Popess Legend in Early Modern England

Craig M. Rustici

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Amid the religious tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English scholars, preachers, and dramatists examined, debated, and refashioned tales concerning Pope Joan, a ninth-century woman who, as legend has it, cross-dressed her way to the papacy only to have her imposture exposed when she gave birth during a solemn procession.
 
The legend concerning a popess had first taken written form in the thirteenth century and for several hundred years was more or less accepted. The Reformation, however, polarized discussions of the legend, pitting Catholics, who denied the story’s veracity, against Protestants, who suspected a cover-up and instantly cited Joan as evidence of papal depravity. In this heated environment, writers reimagined Joan variously as a sorceress, a hermaphrodite, and even a noteworthy author.
 
The Afterlife of Pope Joan examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning the popess’s existence, uncovering the disputants’ historiographic methods, rules of evidence, rhetorical devices, and assumptions concerning what is probable and possible for women and transvestites. Author Craig Rustici then investigates the cultural significance of a series of notions advanced in those debates: the claim that Queen Elizabeth I was a popess in her own right, the charge that Joan penned a book of sorcery, and the curious hypothesis that the popess was not a disguised woman at all but rather a man who experienced a sort of spontaneous sex change.
  
The Afterlife of Pope Joan draws upon the discourses of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and imaginative literature, demonstrating how the popess functioned as a powerful rhetorical instrument and revealing anxieties and ambivalences about gender roles that persist even today. 
 
Craig M. Rustici is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.
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cover of The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885

The Age of Eclecticism

Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885

Christine Bolus-Reichert

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

“The burden of the past” invoked by any discussion of eclecticism is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of literature. The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885 by Christine Bolus-Reichert aims to reframe that dynamic and to place it in a much broader context by examining the rise of a manifold eclecticism in the nineteenth century. Bolus-Reichert focuses on two broad understandings of eclecticism in the period—one understood as an unreflective embrace of either conflicting beliefs or divergent historical styles, the other a mode of critical engagement that ultimately could lead to a rethinking of the contrast between creation and criticism and of the very idea of the original. She also contributes to the emerging field of transnational Victorian studies and, in doing so, finds a way to talk about a broader, post-Romantic nineteenth-century culture.
 
By reviving eclecticism as a critical term, Bolus-Reichert historicizes the theoretical language available to us for describing how Victorian culture functioned—in order to make the terrain of Victorian scholarship international and comparative and create a place for the Victorians in the genealogy of postmodernism. The Age of Eclecticism gives Victorianists—and other students of nineteenth-century literature and culture—a new perspective on familiar debates that intersect in crucial ways with issues still relevant to literature in an age of multiculturalism and postmodernism.
 
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cover of The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24)

The Age of Johnson

A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24)

Jack Lynch

Bucknell University Press, 2021

The move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.

For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century.
 

ISSN 0884-5816.

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cover of The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (Volume 25)

The Age of Johnson

A Scholarly Annual (Volume 25)

Jack Lynch

Bucknell University Press, 2025

For more than twenty years, The Age of Johnson has aspired to present to a wide readership a body of influential Johnsonian scholarship “in the broadest sense,” as founder Paul J. Korshin put it. In keeping with this sentiment, volume 25 contains cant-free scholarly articles and essays written by both leaders in the field and emerging scholars, among them a London barrister and a medical school professor. Featuring lively and penetrating work on Johnson’s medical conditions, his edition of Shakespeare, his books in the Hyde Collection at Harvard, and his relation to American writers, as well as fresh work on Boswell’s travel writing and his curious afterlife in mid-twentieth-century Chicago, volume 25 makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Johnson and his world. Also included are learned and stimulating book reviews on the state of English studies, on Edmund Burke, on Jane Austen, and more.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ISSN 0884-5816
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cover of The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750–1900

The Age of Nightmare

The Gothic and British Culture, 1750–1900

Jeremy Black

St. Augustine's Press, 2022

Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail––namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution. 

Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts. 

In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt. 
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cover of The Alliterative Morte Arthure: The Owl and the Nightingale and Five Other Middle English Poems

The Alliterative Morte Arthure

The Owl and the Nightingale and Five Other Middle English Poems

John Gardner

Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Poets of every age deal with roughly the same human emotions, and for the experienced reader poetry is interesting or not depending upon the moment-by-moment intensity of its appeal. This skillful rendering by John Gardner of seven Middle English poems into sparklingly modern verse translation—most of them for the first time—represents a selection of poems that, generally, have real artistic value but are so difficult to read in the original that they are not as well known as they deserve to be. The seven poems are: The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Winner and Waster, The Parlia­ment of the Three Ages, Summer Sunday, The Debate of Body and Soul, The Thrush and the Nightingale,and The Owl and the Nightingale.

The first four poems represent high points in the alliterative renais­sance of the fourteenth century. Morte Arthure,here translated for the first time in its entirety into modern verse, is the only heroic romance in Middle English—a work roughly in the same genre as the French Song of Roland. The other three poems have been included in the anthology as further poetic examples.

With his employment of extensive comments and notes on the poems, Gardner provides a wealth of aids to appreciation and understanding of his outstanding translations. The anthology will be of interest to general readers as well as to students.

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cover of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

The Animal Claim

Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

Tobias Menely

University of Chicago Press, 2015

During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of animal rights. Such poems were widely cited in later years by legislators advocating animal welfare laws like Martin’s Act of 1822, which provided protections for livestock. In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely links this poetics of sensibility with Enlightenment political philosophy, the rise of the humanitarian public, and the fate of sentimentality, as well as longstanding theoretical questions about voice as a medium of communication.    
      
In the Restoration and eighteenth century, philosophers emphasized the role of sympathy in collective life and began regarding the passionate expression humans share with animals, rather than the spoken or written word, as the elemental medium of community. Menely shows how poetry came to represent this creaturely voice and, by virtue of this advocacy, facilitated the development of a viable discourse of animal rights in the emerging public sphere. Placing sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies, The Animal Claim uncovers crucial connections between eighteenth-century poetry; theories of communication; and post-absolutist, rights-based politics.  
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cover of The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England

The Anonymous Renaissance

Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England

Marcy L. North

University of Chicago Press, 2003

"The Anonymous Renaissance offers a paradigm-shifting look at print culture in early modern England. North demonstrates through sound historical discussions and readings that anonymity was one of the defining practices of Renaissance authorship. It is difficult to overstate the originality and importance of this new study."-Jennifer Summit, Stanford University

The Renaissance was in many ways the beginning of modern and self-conscious authorship, a time when individual genius was celebrated and an author's name could become a book trade commodity. Why, then, did anonymous authorship flourish during the Renaissance rather than disappear? In addressing this puzzle, Marcy L. North reveals the rich history and popularity of anonymity during this period.

The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debaters, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, and yet made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author. In sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice.

Written with clarity and grace, The Anonymous Renaissance will fill a prominent gap in the study of authorship and English literary history.
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The Art of Good Manners

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014

While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, this petite guide offers time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.
           
The Art of Good Manners ranges broadly across topics including courtship, children’s behavior, and civilized conversation before taking the reader through each course at a dinner party, where readers are reminded to neither gurgle the soup nor to make haste with the fruit course since “to peel an orange, apple or pear with a fruit knife and fork requires some practice.”
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Manners is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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cover of The Art of Letter Writing

The Art of Letter Writing

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014

While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, the petite guides in the Bodleian Library’s series offer time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.

The Art of Letter Writing provides more than fifty examples of well-crafted correspondence that will lend confidence whether one needs to break off an engagement, accept an invitation to a country house weekend, complain about a courier, or write to a countess.
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Letter Writing is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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cover of The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929-1960: A Selected Edition

The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929-1960

A Selected Edition

Edited by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes & Elizabeth MacLeod Walls

University of Missouri Press, 2008

Spanning three decades and a host of subjects, E. M. Forster’s radio broadcasts for the BBC were a major contribution to British cultural history, yet today they are rarely acknowledged by scholars of his life and work. But in their day they reached a larger audience than his fiction and established him as a household figure not only in Britain but also in the farthest reaches of its Empire.

As a frequent contributor to the BBC, Forster generally adhered to literary topics but did not shy away from social commentary. This book offers a new appreciation of his vitality and public importance through seventy annotated broadcasts that present him not only as a literary critic but also as a political activist, an advocate for India, and a wary yet cooperative ally of a colonialist government during World War II.

Gathering material either not in print or, if recast as essays, widely scattered, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster reveals aspects of Forster’s intellect that have been given short shrift in previous studies. Nearly half the scripts date from 1941 to 1945 and provide an eyewitness account of war from a distinguished perspective. Forster comments on how the arts gallantly survived the blitz—even taking his listeners to the theater as bombing threats loom—and in other cases protests government interference in private life or the limits on free expression caused by the wartime paper shortage.

In these scripts, Forster casts a cosmopolitan eye on contemporary literature from James Joyce to John Steinbeck and provides early exposure for young writers and composers. He also enlarges the scope of European art by pairing Jane Austen or C. S. Lewis with Indian writers and offers pointed comments on contemporary literati such as Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. Annotations to each piece identify Forster’s references and trace his revisions from script to broadcast, while the book’s introduction places his emergence as a distinctive radio voice within the historical, creative, and institutional contexts of broadcasting in his day.

This significant body of writing, too long overlooked, traces Forster’s evolution from novelist to adroit cultural critic and shows how a man who was never comfortable with machines played an important role in shaping a new medium. The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster situates Forster as one of the most poignant voices of the twentieth century as it offers new insight into a nation transfigured by war.

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cover of The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition

The Bottom Translation

Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition

Jan Kott

Northwestern University Press, 1987

The Bottom Translation represents the first critical attempt at applying the ideas and methods of the great Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, to the works of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans. Professor Kott uncovers the cultural and mythopoetic traditions underlying A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Dr. Faustus, and other plays. His method draws him to interpret these works in the light of the carnival and popular tradition as it was set forth by Bakhtin. The Bottom Translation breaks new ground in critical thinking and theatrical vision and is an invaluable source of new ideas and perspectives. Included in this volume is also an extraordinary essay on Kurosawa's "Ran" in which the Japanese filmmaker recreates King Lear.
[more]
cover of The Brontës and the Fairy Tale

The Brontës and the Fairy Tale

Jessica Campbell

Ohio University Press, 2024

The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folklore in the work of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë. It intervenes in debates on genre, literary realism, the history of the fairy tale, and the position of women in the Victorian period. Building on recent scholarship emphasizing the dynamic relationship between the fairy tale and other genres in the nineteenth century, the book resituates the Brontës’ engagement with fairy tales in the context of twenty-first-century assumptions that the stories primarily evoke childhood and happy endings. Jessica Campbell argues instead that fairy tales and folklore function across the Brontës’ works as plot and character models, commentaries on gender, and signifiers of national identity.

Scholars have long characterized the fairy tale as a form with tremendous power to influence cultures and individuals. The late twentieth century saw important critical work revealing the sinister aspects of that power, particularly its negative effects on female readers. But such an approach can inadvertently reduce the history of the fairy tale to a linear development from the “traditional” tale (pure, straight, patriarchal, and didactic) to the “postmodern” tale (playful, sophisticated, feminist, and radical). Campbell joins other contemporary scholars in arguing that the fairy tale has always been a remarkably elastic form, allowing writers and storytellers of all types to reshape it according to their purposes.

The Brontës are most famous today for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, haunting novels that clearly repurpose fairy tales and folklore. Campbell’s book, however, reveals similar repurposing throughout the entire Brontë oeuvre. The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is recursive: in demonstrating the ubiquity and multiplicity of uses of fairy tales in the works of the Brontës, Campbell enhances not only our understanding of the Brontës’ works but also the status of fairy tales in the Victorian period.
[more]
cover of The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity

The Burdens of Intimacy

Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity

Christopher Lane

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age.

Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.

[more]
cover of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life

The Calamity Form

On Poetry and Social Life

Anahid Nersessian

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
 
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.
[more]
cover of The Carleton Bigamy Trial

The Carleton Bigamy Trial

Mary Carleton

Iter Press, 2023

Multiple conflicting perspectives come together in this collection to provide a Rashomon-style account of marriage, fraud, and trickery in seventeenth-century England.
 
Mary Carleton was an ordinary woman from Canterbury who entered historical records when she was accused of bigamy. The seven pamphlets in this edition focus on the bigamy trial of Mary Carleton, in which the accused eloquently defends herself and is ultimately acquitted. Written in the early years of the English Restoration, they demonstrate that narratives presenting what “she said” and what “he said” can reveal, forcefully and painfully, how truth can be fragmented in the different arenas of law, love, and politics. Through their disparate accounts of a marriage gone wrong, these pamphlets reinforce the social status quo even while they radically shatter the very foundations that give it heft. In asking readers to question absolutes, they unmask the precarious relationship between words and the world.
 
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cover of The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield

The Cat and the Human Imagination

Feline Images from Bast to Garfield

Katharine M. Rogers

University of Michigan Press, 2001

The Cat and the Human Imagination is a fascinating historical survey of the changing cultural attitudes towards cats and the myriad ways that they have been depicted in literature and art. Feline images have permeated civilization since the time of the ancient Egyptians, and during this time the status of the cat has changed dramatically. The book examines the changing images-- fertility goddess, sly little predator, agent of Satan, avenging witness, aristocrat, friend, spirit of the home, bloodthirsty killer, seductive female--and relates them to the contexts in which they arose. It also analyzes how human attitudes towards cats seem to have evolved in parallel with attitudes towards animals, towards authority, and towards gender.
Western literature and visual art have reflected this change, developing from bare sketches to richly varied expressions of feline personality and human interaction with cats. Katharine M. Rogers seeks out the cats who make appearances in an impressive range of literary and artistic works, providing the first critical look at the symbolic functioning of cat characters in Poe's "The Black Cat," Dickens's Bleak House, and Zola's Therese Raquin, among other literary works. The historical and artistic range covered is impressive, creating a rich compendium that is the ideal book for the cat lover seeking a refreshingly substantial and scholarly work about this fascinating animal.
"This book is a classic-- something every cat-loving intellectual will have to own. (No one, of course, ever really owns a cat--but everyone should own this book.) It's the kind of book you want to quote from at the vet's, or cocktail parties, or whenever you get the urge to convert a dog lover to the true faith." --Emily Toth, Louisiana State University
Katharine M. Rogers is Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York. Her previous books include Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England and Frances Burney: The World of "Female Difficulties."
[more]
cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. XX, The Consular Letters, 1856–1857

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Vol. XX, The Consular Letters, 1856–1857

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1988

"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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cover of The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice

The Chartist Imaginary

Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice

Margaret A. Loose

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

Can imaginative literature change the political and social history of a class or nation? In The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice, Margaret Loose turns to the Chartist Movement—Britain’s first mass working-class movement, dating from the 1830s to the 1840s—and argues that, based on literature by members of the movement, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.” Chartist writing awakened workers’ awareness of discord between professed ideals and reality; exercised their conceptual powers (literary and social); and sharpened their appetite for more knowledge, intellectual power, dignity, and agency in the present to fashion a utopian future. Igniting such self-respecting, politically transfigurative energy was a unique kind of agency Loose calls “the Chartist imaginary.” In examining the Chartist movement, Loose balances the nervous projections of canonical Victorian writers against a consideration of the ways that laborers represented Chartism’s aims and tactics.
 
The Chartist Imaginary offers close readings of poems and fiction by Chartist figures from Ernest Jones and Thomas Cooper to W. J. Linton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and Gerald Massey. It also draws on extensive archival research to examine, for the first time, working-class female Chartist poets Mary Hutton, E. L. E., and Elizabeth La Mont. Focusing on the literary form of these works, Loose strongly argues for the political power of the aesthetic in working-class literature.
 
[more]
cover of The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England

The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England

Mary Astell

Iter Press, 2013

This book is the most mature and comprehensive statement of Mary Astell’s religious and philosophical views. It also represents the culmination of Astell’s feminist project to teach her fellow women how to lead useful lives of virtue and wisdom. The main purpose of this work is to instruct women about the ultimate nature of reality, the true source of happiness, their duties and obligations to God, and about “how best to live” and how to treat other people. This volume offers the first complete modern version of the 1717 second edition. It provides a fully modernized text, a scholarly introduction, biographical and bibliographical information, general historical-intellectual background, and definitions of obscure and archaic terms.
[more]
cover of The Circuit of Apollo: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Tributes to Women

The Circuit of Apollo

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Tributes to Women

Laura Runge

University of Delaware Press, 2019

Written by a combination of established scholars and new critics in the field, the essays collected in Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century. Women’s tributes to each other sometimes took the form of critical engagement or competition, but they always exposed the feminocentric networks of artistic, social, and material exchange women created and maintained both in and outside of London. This volume advocates for a new perspective for researching and teaching early modern women that is grounded in admiration.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
[more]
cover of The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 5: 1892-1895

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 5

1892-1895

George Gissing

Ohio University Press, 1994

Gissing’s career, which spanned the period of about 1877 to his death in 1903, was characterized by prodigious output (almost a novel a year in the early days), modest recognition, and modest income. He wrote of poverty, socialism, class differences, social reform, and later on, about the problems of women and industrialization. His best known works are New Grub Street (1891) and Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), rich sources of social commentary that reflect a literary transition from the Victorian to the modern period.

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. Now the editors have culled widely scattered sources—private and public collections, journals, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, and sales catalogs—to gather and organize Gissing’s correspondence, including letters to him, and to provide an editorial context.

The years 1892-1895 saw an increase in the bulk and scope of Gissing’s literary production, coinciding with his new and cordial association with publishers Bullen and Lawrence. During this period, the partners published Denzil Quarrier, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, ad Eve’s Ransom, while A. and C. Black brought out Born in Exile. Gissing’s correspondence with his publishers, some of which is printed here for the first time, is matched in significance by his letters to his literary agent William Morris Colles and to editors such as Clement Shorter, who were instrumental in turning Gissing to the short story. His domestic life remained grim: his unfortunate marriage ruled out the possibility of satisfactory social relationships, and his anxiety over the care of his son Walter was eased only by sending the infant away to stay with strangers. New friends, especially Clara Collet and Edward Clodd, were a precious asset—in their presence he could be his better self, a highly cultured, joy-loving individual whose work was finding greater favor with the public.

[more]
cover of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: July 1836–December 1837, Volume 9

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

July 1836–December 1837, Volume 9

Charles Richard Sanders

Duke University Press, 0

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
[more]
cover of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: October 1833–December 1834, Volume 7

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

October 1833–December 1834, Volume 7

Charles Richard Sanders

Duke University Press, 0

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
[more]
cover of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: Volume XI. The Last Word

The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold

Volume XI. The Last Word

Matthew Arnold

University of Michigan Press, 1977

Essays on literary criticism, public education, and Irish home rule are included in the final volume of this series
[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume I: With Variant Readings And Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume I

With Variant Readings And Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1969

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume I contains two dramatic poems, Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession and Paracelsus, along with a sonnet, “Eyes Calm Beside Thee.” Pauline was written in 1832 and published in March 1833, London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street.

Browning’s principal source material for Paracelsus was Frederick Bitiskius’s edition of the works of Paracelsus, the early Renaissance alchemist, mystic, and physician; as well as the article on Paracelsus in the Biographie Universelle. E. D. H. Johnson wrote that in Paracelsus, “Browning first attacks the problem of communication, while still insisting on the primacy of the intuitions over the rational intellect. Paracelsus is a study of intellectual pride and its humbling.”

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume II: With Variant Readings And Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume II

With Variant Readings And Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1971

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume II contains Browning’s play, Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837), and the long poem, Sordello (1840). Strafford was Browning’s first play, based on the tragic life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The editors note that the play had only four performances, “undoubtedly due… to its esoteric subject and bad acting.” Sordello is a fictionalized version of the life of Sordello da Goito, a 13th century Italian troubadour. The poem itself was famously known for being “difficult.”

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume III: With Variant Readings And Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume III

With Variant Readings And Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1972

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume III contains Browning’s dramatic piece, Pippa Passes (1841), which Arthur Symons said was “Browning’s most perfect work”; another play King Victor and King Charles; A Tragedy, which Browning described as “the first artistic consequence of what Voltaire termed ‘a terrible event without consequences‘“; the “Essay on Chatterton,” which appeared anonymously in the Foreign Quarterly Review in July, 1842; the play The Return of the Druses: A Tragedy (1843); and the short pieces of Dramatic Lyrics, which contain some of Browning’s finest and most popular works such as “My Last Duchess,” “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume IX: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume IX

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1990

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume V: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume V

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Roma A. King Jr.

Ohio University Press, 1981

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture. Volume V contains: A Soul’s TragedyPoemsChristmas-Eve and Easter DayEssay on ShelleyMen and Women, Vol. I As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume VI: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume VI

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1996

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

The sixth in the projected seventeen-volume work, this volume covers the second half of Men and Women (1855), perhaps Browning’s most famous collection, and the entirety of Dramatis Personae (1864), the first book Browning produced after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861.

Men and Women II contains several great dramatic poems on which Browning’s reputation still depends, including “Andrea del Sarto,” “Saul,” and “Cleon.” It also includes the more intimate and personal works “The Guardian Angel” and “One Word More,” as well as the mysterious “Women and Roses.” The Brownings‘ shared interests in Renaissance art and nineteenth-century Italian politics inform the challenging “Old Pictures in Florence.”

The publication of Dramatis Personae was a key event in the rapid rise of Browning’s fame in the 1860s, though the collection is marked by a welter of conflicting impulses that arose after the poet left Italy and his married life behind. The classic monologues “Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “Abt Vogler” are here, but beside them Browning placed the nearly surreal “Caliban upon Setebos” and the achingly self-regarding “James Lee’s Wife,” one of the volume’s handful of dramatic lyrics about betrayed or failed relationships. Also included are “A Death in the Desert,” which contributed to the intense Victorian debate about scriptural validity and religious authority; and “Mr Sludge, ’The Medium,‘” Browning’s ferocious, pyrotechnic exposé of a spiritualist fraud.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume VII: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume VII

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1985

The first complete edition of the works of Robert Browning with variant readings and annotations contains: 1. The entire contents of the first editions of Browning’s work; 2. All prefaces and dedications which Browning wrote for his own works and for those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others; 3. The two prose essays: The Essay on Chatterton and The Essay on Shelley; 4. The front matter and tables of contents of each of the collected editions (1849, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888–1889) which Browning himself saw through the press; 5 Poems by Browning published during his lifetime but not collected by him; 9. Poems not published during Browning’s lifetime which have come to light since his death; 7. John Forster’s Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford to which Browning contributed significantly, though to what precise extent has not been determined.

The edition provides a full apparatus, including variant readings and annotations.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1999

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X contains critical editions of Balaustion's Adventure: Including a Transcript from Euripides and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. Both published in 1871, these two long poems take up a pair of subjects that held enduring fascination for Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: classical Greek literature and the career of Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Balaustion's Adventure, which the poet characterized as merely a “May-month amusement,” was surprisingly successful with the reading public that paid more attention to Browning after the triumph of The Ring and the Book in 1868-69. His first poem since the publication of that masterpiece, Balaustion's Adventure creates a charming and brave narrator who recalls in vivid detail a performance of Euripides' play Alcestis.

Browning began a poem on Louis Napoleon in 1860, but not until after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 did he attempt a full-scale portrait of the French emperor. As an exercise in self-justification, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau falls into a familiar sub-genre of Browning's dramatic monologues. The most intriguing aspect of the poem lies in its biographical importance: the character and career of Napoleon III was a topic of sustained, sharp disagreement between Robert and Elizabeth Browning.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XI: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XI

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 2008

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.


Volume XI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning contains two strikingly disparate long poems from the 1870s, Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. In Fifine at the Fair, Browning creates an idiosyncratic version of the Don Juan figure, a distinctly post-Romantic and intellectual Don Juan who derives little from any literary predecessor. The legendary character is realized in a modern French setting, the village of Pornic, a favorite vacation spot for Browning. The poem is a sustained exercise in self-justification and casuistry, with Don Juan persuading himself that he can reconcile his love of his wife with his carnal love for a gipsy girl.

Though Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is similarly concerned with a struggle between spirit and flesh, the poem is entirely based in contemporary events. Using newspaper accounts and legal documents, Browning tells the strange and shocking tale of a rich and devout Frenchman who throws himself from the roof of his chateau, convinced that heaven will deliver him from death. Upon the question of his sanity hinges the disposition of his considerable estate, and the poet traces the claims and counterclaims to their settlement in court only a few months before he wrote the poem.

As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIII: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIII

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 1995

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.
[more]
cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 2003

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume XIV of The Complete Works of Robert Browning records a transition in the poet’s career. With The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), Browning ended his experiments with classical sources, creating his “transcript” — not quite a translation — of the Greek original and providing an intriguing explanation for his approach. La Saisiaz, the deeply personal expression of Browning’s shock at the sudden death of a dear friend, was published in 1878 with The Two Poets of Croisic, an extended ironic meditation on literary fame. Browning’s collection of six poems under the title Dramatic Idyls (1879) marks the poet’s return to the dramatic forms he perfected in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, and a revival of his interest in the psychology of motives.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

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cover of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV: With Variant Readings and Annotations

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Robert Browning

Ohio University Press, 2007

In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents. Ranging across eras and cultures, the books here reveal his late thoughts about history, myth, legend, faith, love, and desire. He had never been more popular, and the founding of the BrowningSociety in 1881 expanded both his audience and his sense of his place in English letters.The first title in Volume XV is Dramatic Idylls, Second Series (1880). Taking his subjects from classical history, colonial India, Arabian legend, medieval sorcery, Jewish folk tales, and Greek myth, Browning startles the reader with the rapidity of his thought and the inventiveness of his art. In Jocoseria (1883) Browning’s subjects range across time and space from Hebraic legend to the England of the Romantics. Such variety helped attract new readers: Jocoseria was immediately successful, and a second edition was printed in the same year as the first.Although Browning’s next volume, Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), was so popular that three editions were printed in less than two years, this artful string of anecdotes and lyrics has attracted little favorable criticism. The materials— Persian legends and Arabic backgrounds—chimed with the wildly popularOrientalism of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, Whistler’s Peacock Room, and Alma-Tadema’s paintings. But the thought was pure Browning in his most optimistic vein, and not at all in tune with the growing pessimism of the day.As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.
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