You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book examines the maneuvers through which U.S. partisans encoded the turmoil of antebellum America in terms of English affiliation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for southern and northern Americans, it locates sectionalism in a broader Atlantic context of cultural imagination and literary production.
OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.
Exploring a range of poverty experiences-socioeconomic, moral and spiritual-this collection presents new research by a distinguished group of scholars working in the medieval and early modern periods. Collectively they explore both the assumptions and strategies of those in authority dealing with poverty and the ways in which the poor themselves tried to contribute to, exploit, avoid or challenge the systems for dealing with their situation. The studies demonstrate that poverty was by no means a simple phenomenon. It varied according to gender, age and geographical location; and the way it was depicted in speech, writing and visual images could as much affect how the poor experienced their poverty as how others saw and judged them. Using new sources-and adopting new approaches to known sources-the authors share insights into the management and the self-management of the poor, and search out aspects of the experience of poverty worthy of note, from which can be traced lasting influences on the continuing understanding and experience of poverty in pre-modern Europe.
This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Rom...
Through a wide variety of verbal and pictorial references, this book demonstrates how Wordsworth's iconography, albeit apparently 'collateral', makes crucial contributions to his central arguments and preoccupations in The Excursion, as well as in his other major works.
'On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents'. As Henry James surveys London in 1888, he sums up what had fascinated urban observers for a century: the random and even accidental development of this unprecedented form of human settlement, the modern metropolis. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis takes James at his word, arguing that accident was both a powerful metaphor and material context through which the Victorians arrested the paradoxes of metropolitan modernity and reconfigured understandings of form and change. Paul Fyfe shows how the material conditions of urban accidents offer new and compelling modes of analysis for intellectual and liter...
The proper organisation of rural communities was central to political and social debates at the turn of the eighteenth century, and featured strongly in the 1790s political polemic that influenced so many Romantic poets and novelists. This book investigates the representation of the rural village and country town in a range of Romantic texts.
How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distribution In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, Nicolazzo's work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.
This book offers a new interpretation of Wordsworth's poetry, combining concepts of travel, 'states of nature' and language.