Literature

This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.

The subject of this book is the importance of the mother–infant relationship in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry and life. However, the book also uses Shelley as a touchstone by which to examine the rich historical and theoretical issues relevant to motherhood in the Romantic period. The book offers a detailed account of the historical rise in attention paid to mothering, the changing cultural attitudes towards the role of the mother, and the resulting effect on the nature of family life. It further discusses the psychoanalytic, Marxist, and developmental approaches to the mother–infant relationship, particularly to the connection each makes between that relationship and the acquisition of language. By combining psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and feminist theory with extensive biographical material on Shelley and information on the position of mothers in England after 1790, the book offers an important reassessment of Shelley’s avowed feminism and the failure of his utopian vision.

The rhymes in poems are important to understanding how poets write; and in the nineteenth century, rhyme conditioned the ways in which poets heard both themselves and each other writing. This book studies the significance of rhyme in Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and other poets, including Coleridge, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Swinburne, and Hardy. The book’s stylistic reading of nineteenth-century poetry argues for Wordsworth’s centrality to issues of intention and chance in poets’ work, and offers a reading of the formal choices made in poetry as profoundly revealing points of intertextual relation. The book ranges widely, and includes detailed consideration of the critical meaning of both rhyme and repetition, bringing to bear an emphasis on form as poetry’s crucial proving-ground. In a series of detailed readings of important poems, the book shows how close formal attention goes beyond critical formalism, and can become a way of illuminating poets’ deepest preoccupations, doubts, and beliefs. Wordsworth’s sounding of his own poetic voice, in blank verse as well as rhyme, is here taken as a model for the ways in which later nineteenth-century poets attend to the most perplexing and important voicings of their own poetic originality.

This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the 19th century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of 19th-century literature's relationship with science. In particular, it brings the physical sciences more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has previously been the case. Writers discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some well-known in the history of science (including Faraday, Herschel, and Whewell), and a raft of lesser-known figures. Alice Jenkins draws a new map of the interactions between literature and science in the first half of the 19th century, showing how both disciplines were wrestling with the same central political and intellectual concerns — regulating access to knowledge, organising knowledge productively, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledge. Space has become a subject of enormous critical interest in literary and cultural studies. This book gives a wide-ranging account of how early nineteenth-century writers thought about — and thought with — space. Burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Writers in all genres and disciplines, from across the political spectrum, returned repeatedly to ideas and images of space when they needed to set up or dismantle boundaries in the intellectual realm, and when they wanted to talk about what kinds of knowledge certain groups of readers wanted, needed, or deserved.

This book explores the romance that can attach to the notion of suffering in travel, and the importance of the persona of ‘suffering traveller’ in the Romantic self-fashioning of figures, such as Wordsworth and Byron. It considers how the Romantics sought to differentiate themselves from other contemporary tourists by following alternative models and alternative travel ‘scripts’ in both their travel and their travel writing. Rejecting more conventional roles, such as those of the picturesque tourist and the Grand Tourist, the Romantic traveller's anti-tourism leads to an emphasis on authenticity, adventure, and misadventure in the travel experience. Prioritizing such experiences, Romantic travellers often drew their models and their travel ‘scripts’ from sub-genres of contemporary travel writing, such as the shipwreck narrative, the exploration narrative, the captivity narrative, and the mountaineering narrative. This study accordingly considers the diverse reasons (touching variously upon some of the major philosophical, theological, and political issues of the day) why Romantic travellers and writers were so drawn to this literature of misadventure. It then treats Wordsworth and Byron as especially influential examples of this tendency in Romanticism. It shows them to be figures who often sought — not only in writing but also in action, in the course of their own travelling — to re-enact such misadventures, and to script both their travels and their personae as travellers according to scenes and situations found in these ‘misadventurous’ branches of travel writing.