Love is often called a leap of faith. But can faith be described as a leap of love? In Touching God: Hopkins and Love, Duc Dau argues that the conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Roman Catholicism was one of his most romantic acts.

Touching God is the first book devoted to love in the writings of Hopkins, illuminating our understanding of him as a romantic poet. Discussions of desire in Hopkins poetry have focused on his tortured and unrequited attraction to men. In contrast, Dau builds on existing queer and conventional readings of the poet s work by turning to theories of...

This volume is a brief anthology of the most influential writing by American scientists between 1800 and 1900. Arranged thematically and chronologically to highlight the movement of American science throughout the nineteenth century, from its beginnings in self-taught classification and exploration to the movement towards university education and specialization, this anthology is the first of its kind. Biographies front each section, putting human faces to each time period, and the anthology includes such notable names as Thomas Jefferson and Louis Agassiz.

The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. Guidebooks and manuals were produced in large numbers to help readers negotiate new cultural phenomena, and their concerns - including image-making, diet, stress, lack of time, and the frustrations of public transport - betray contemporary political tensions and social anxieties alongside the practical advice offered. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period, as writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Hugo and Zola embraced 'modernity' and...

In the opening chapter of her 1866 novel 'Felix Holt', George Eliot tells her readers that the 'vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence'. 'George Eliot's Grammar of Being' is developed from the idea that George Eliot wanted to produce these vibrations within her novels, not just at the level of story and character, but also at the level of language. She was a novelist who wanted the public to read her sentences almost as carefully as she wrote them to make her readers find and subconsciously respond to those places in the prose where...

This major work in Ruskin studies offers a timely re-evaluation of the origins, formation and workings of John Ruskin s Guild of St George. Drawing on both significant and recently discovered archive material and existing research, this work looks afresh at the genesis of Ruskin s ideas and their translation into practice.

Since Ruskin criticism began, attention has been drawn to the Guild of St George, Ruskin s attempt in the 1870s and 1880s to foster a series of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, and...

In this collection of essays on Hamlin Garland, Donald Pizer attempts to re-establish the wealth and importance of the early work and activities of the radical, Pulitzer Prize winning writer from the Midwest. Essays in the opening half of the book are devoted to Garland s radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second part concentrate on his most permanent, well-known work of this period: Main-Travelled Roads, Rose of Dutcher s Coolly, and A Son of the Middle Border .

In the preface to this volume, Pizer traces the overall coherence of Garland s...

Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860 1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of...

The Oxford Movement, initiating what is commonly called the Catholic Revival of the Church of England and of global Anglicanism more generally, has been a perennial subject of study by historians since its beginning in the 1830s. But the leader of the movement whose name was most associated with it during the nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, has long been neglected by historical studies of the Anglican Catholic Revival. What attention has been paid to him by scholars has produced a largely negative picture of this complex man. This collection of essays seeks to redress the...

Jane Austen s Families discusses the fictional families such as the Bennets and the Bertrams whose dynamics are crucial both to Austen s plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. The study focuses upon the central characters interactions with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups in an exploration of how emotional and moral development is both hindered and fostered by these interactions. Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about the orphaned heroines so often preferred by novelists of the period; rather, for a writer who cares intensely...

William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856 1890 offers a new reading of Morris s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that Morris s work demonstrates an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories to the late propaganda poems and political romances.

Hanson examines Morris s imagination of violence as a way of understanding the...