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Examines the feminine, the domestic, the local, collective, sentimental and novelistic in the Romantic literary canon. This book questions romanticism, suppression of the feminine, the material, and the collective, and its opposition to readings centering on these concerns.
Although Frankenstein is now widely taught in classes on Romanticism, little attention has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works. Indeed the excitement of the last decade at feminist approaches to Frankenstein has ironically obscured the persona of its author. This collection of essays, written by a preeminent group of Romantic scholars, sketches a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley": the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent interplay among issues of family, gender, and society, and whose writings resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics, culture, and feminism. By analyzing a previously neglected body of novels, novellas, reviews, travel writing, essays, letters, biographies, and tales, and by emphasizing Mary Shelley's shrewd assessment of Romanticism, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking evaluation of one of the foremost cultural critics of the nineteenth century.
A fascinating account of the emergence of the writer's house museum over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. It considers the museum as a cultural form and asks why it appeared and how it has constructed authorial afterlife for readers individually and collectively.
The first extended study of black and Asian writing in Britain, now updated and available in paperback.
1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men...
The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 considers the history of the libraries that the East India Company and Regular Army respectively established for soldiers during the nineteenth century. Drawing upon a wide range of material, including archival sources, official reports, and soldiers’ memoirs and letters, this book explores the motivations of those who were responsible for the setting up and/or operation of the libraries, and examines what they reveal about attitudes to military readers in particular and, more broadly, to working-class readers – and leisure – at this period. Murphy’s study also considers the contents of the libraries, identifying what kinds of works were provided for soldiers and where and how they read them. In so doing, The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 affords another way of thinking about some of the key debates that mark book history today, and illuminates areas of interest to the general reader as well as to literary critics and military and cultural historians.
Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric pursues two goals. The title signals the contribution to debates about reading. Do we think 'through' - 'by means of', 'with'- poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces? Is this compatible with a second meaning: 'thinking through' poems to their end-solving a problem, getting to its root, its deep truth? Third, can we square these surface and depth readings with a speculative, philosophical criticism to which the poem carries us, where 'through' denotes a 'going beyond?' All three meanings of 'through' are in play throughout. The subtitle applies 'field' first to Romantic studies since the 1980s, a field that this project refle...
“Some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley’s work . . . A valuable piece of criticism.” —Byron Journal Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley—author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews—emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the l...
A critical study of the prominent British poet’s work. Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff’s excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward's most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers. Reading Seward’s writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism...
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is one of the most frequently and heatedly discussed texts in the canon of eighteenth-century transatlantic literature written in English. Equiano’s Narrative contains an engrossing account of the author’s experiences in Africa, the Americas, and Europe as he sought freedom from bondage and became a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. While scholars have approached this sophisticated work from diverse critical and historical/biographical perspectives, there has been, until now, little written about the ways in which it can be successfully taught in the twenty-first...