Literature

In this reading of seven of Hardy's major novels, the book argues that the fiction is shaped by a pervasive anxiety about the body and about bodily disintegration. Taking as its starting-point the many somatic images and metaphors within the novels, the book uncovers a subtext about the threat of bodily and psychic dissolution which shapes both Hardy's powerful depiction of nature and his ambivalent treatment of women. This approach focuses on aspects of the fiction which are often underemphasized, especially the figurative dimension of Hardy's language and his treatment of his minor characters; and accounts for peculiarities in tone, plotting, and characterization which have always attracted critical attention.

This is a detailed exploration of Thomas Hardy's linguistic ‘awkwardness’, a subject that has long puzzled critics. It shows that Hardy's language must be understood as a distinctive response to the philological and literary issues of his time. Deeply influenced by the Victorian historical study of language, Hardy deliberately incorporated into his own writing a sense of language's recent and hidden history, its multiple stages and classes, and its arbitrary motivations. Indeed, the book argues, Hardy provides an example of how a writer ‘purifies the dialect of the tribe’ by inclusiveness, by heterogeniety, and by a sense of history which distinguishes Hardy from a more ahistorical, synchronic modernist aesthetic and which constitutes an ongoing challenge to literary language. In this treatment of a writer's relation to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the book also examines the influence on Hardy's language of the founding and development, in this period, of the OED.

This book presents an integrated approach to the literary and non-literary writings of the major German author, Heinrich von Kleist. Analysis of Kleist's early letters, in particular, illuminates the oblique and unique processes by which he became aware of his vocation; simultaneously offering new perspectives from which to approach the works themselves. The discipline of recording observations based on visits to art galleries and travels through landscapes and towns in Prussia, Saxony, and Franconia stimulated Kleist's imagination, providing sets and scenarios which brought him gradually to an awareness of his innate dramatic talents. On a more theoretical level, he was led to speculate about the problem of illusion in art at the same time as he was wrestling with the epistemological implications of Kantian philosophy. The negative aspects of illusion which he drew from the latter were complemented by a new-found confidence in his ability as an artist to impart to the ‘fragility’ of the human condition a degree of fixity through form and structure and the coherence and control associated with verbal devices such as paradox and irony. These principles are shown to operate to varying degrees in all Kleist's works, and to gain in subtlety and depth, nowhere more than in his final masterpiece, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.

This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes to history as a narrative model, tracing the development from his early interest in ‘scientific’ historiography to the radically anti-historical character of his late works. James's use of the term ‘history’ was influenced by developments in nineteenth-century historiography, but was also embedded in the complex of defensive manœuvres through which Victorian culture sought to control its anxiety about the power of fiction. Reading James's novels in the light of contemporary debates about the morality and authorship and the politics of reading, the author finds that fiction develops from being history's censored ‘other’ in the early works to being a valued mode of problem-solving in the later fiction. This shift may be seen as the product of James's increasing engagement with the reading practices of groups marginalised by high Victorian culture: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde. The book ends with a consideration of the challenge posed to James's radical anti-historical epistemology by the unprecedented violence of twentieth-century history.

The conventional picture of the young Hopkins as a conservative High-Church ritualist is starkly contested by this book, which draws upon his unpublished Oxford essays on philosophy to reveal a boldly speculative intellectual liberal. Less concerned with Christian factionalism than with countering contemporary threats to faith itself, Hopkins' thought is seen to follow that of his teachers Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who turned to Kant and Hegel to vouchsafe the grounds of Christian belief against contemporary scientism. Hopkins' personal metaphysic of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, which has long been recognized as crucial to the understanding of his poetry, is traced here to concepts derived from the ‘British Idealism’ he encountered at Oxford and the new energy physics of the 1850s and 1860s. By locating his thought at the intellectual avant-garde of his age, the striking modernity of his poetry need no longer be seen as an historical anomaly. The book offers radical re-readings not only of his metaphysics and theology, but also of his best-known poems.

Although Housman's three collections of poems, the third published posthumously, have remained popular, they have not received much serious critical attention. The author makes good the omission in this reappraisal of the whole oeuvre, placing Housman's achievement in the context of the poetry of his own time and of more recent European and American poetry. Close analysis and comparison with other poets – Hardy, Frost, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and Paul Celan – prove illuminating in relation to a poet who has usually been considered something of an odd man out, and even an anachronism in the modern era. The author explores and explains the continuing appeal of the poet to present-day readers, and the nature of the craftsmanship and psychology which lie behind the deceptive simplicities of his poetry.

This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of ‘monstrosity’ generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The book shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.

Interest in Jane Austen has never been greater, but it is revitalised by the advent of feminist literary history. In a substantial new introduction the author places this book, which was first published in 1975, within the larger tradition of post-war criticism, from the generation of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and F. R. Leavis to that of the now-dominant feminist critics. The book argues that Austen herself lived in contentious times. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, she served her literary apprenticeship in the 1790s, the decade of the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, an era in England of polemic and hysteria. Political partisanship shaped the novel of her youth, in content, form, and style. The book now examines the very different schools of writing about Austen, and finds in them some unexpected continuities, such as a willingness to recruit her to modern aims, but a reluctance to engage with her own history. When the book first came out, it attracted attention for its fresh, controversial approach to ideas on Austen. The new edition shows how the arrival of feminism has made the task of the literary historian more vital and challenging than ever.