19th-century and Victorian Literature

Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. This book presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. The book also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

This book is an innovative reading of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Gothic. Most critics have treated these two forms of historical narrative as though they were completely unrelated, but this detailed study places Scott's work in the context of Gothic fictions from Walpole to Maturin. In so doing, the author highlights their shared techniques of narrative deferral, fantasies of origin and originality, and strategies of authenticity and authority. The book takes in the whole range of Waverley Novels, and includes analyses of such neglected works as The Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, and Woodstock, as well as the more frequently studied Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, and Redgauntlet. Offering fresh insight into the variety and complexity of Scott's novels, and into the traditions of criticism that have so often obscured them, this book contributes to the study of Romanticism, the novel, and to current theoretical debates concerning historical fiction and historiographic authority.

This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as insights into the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. This book traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. This study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel.

This book is the second in the two-volume study of the work of Stéphanie Mallarmé (1842–1898). For Mallarmé, in a world without God, the role of the poet is to break the silence with language and to confer upon the contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and semantic pattern. Literature provides a ‘translation of silence’, ‘intimate galas’ in which the mysterious drama of the human condition is performed for and by the reader on the stage of the verse poem, the prose poem, and what Mallarmé calls the ‘poëme critique’. In Part 1, the book examines the prose poems within the context of Mallarmé's writing about the theatre. In Part II, the book focuses on the ‘circumstanzas’ —, the famous ‘Tombeaux’, ‘Hommages’, ‘Eventails’, and ‘vers de circonstance’ —, in which Mallarmé invests the quotidian with the ‘glorious lie’ of poetry. In a series of close readings the book demonstrates how complex poetic structures, and especially the sonnet, may serve to guide the human search for meaning and shape our anguish in a ‘ceremony of the Book’.

H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man’s only alternative to self‐destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells’s late‐Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries—with consequences for the nature both of Wells’s writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late‐Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870–1 Education Acts. It considers Wells’s best‐known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono‐Bungay. It also examines less well‐known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon, and Wells’s journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells’s best‐selling book in his own lifetime.

Mencken believed that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were sacred documents that set clear lines of demarcation that no government should trespass. “The two main ideas that run through all of my writing”, he said, “whether it be literary criticism or political polemic, are these: I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud”. Freedom had always been an issue with Mencken: first, freedom from his father's choice of a career; later, as he developed as a critic, from the Victorian Puritanism that stifled American life; then, from governmental laws that violated civil liberties for whites and blacks; and finally, during the two world wars, freedom from censorship of the press.