The Godwinian Novel is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In the first study of these authors as a historically specific group, Pamela Clemit argues for a greater unity between Godwin's fictional techniques and his radical political philosophy than has been perceived. Her analysis of the works of Brown and Mary Shelley, moreover, reveals how these writers modified, reshaped, and redefined Godwin's distinctive themes and techniques in...

This book examines the relations between the textual organization of Ulysses and the notions of time, language and poetics implicit in the novel. Making use of recent developments in philosophy and literary theory, it argues that Ulysses is a complex transitional text involving various degrees of mediation between opposing impulses such as naturalism and schematism, unification and detotalization. Examining Joyce's use of repetition, the use of a differentiated and heterogeneous temporal experience, and Joyce's early aesthetic theories, this book clarifies the notion of tradition implied in...

Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 focuses on the work produced collaboratively between 1816 and 1822 by the poet and radical journalist William Hone and the brilliant young graphic satirist George Cruikshank. Wood provides a much needed analytical framework for Regency radical satire uncovering a set of new sources and previously unknown cultural contexts for Hone and Cruikshank's work, which is shown to combine modernity and tradition in thrilling ways. Entertaining and original, this is an important contribution to the study of radical satire, which sheds new light on the relations...

Since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's critical standing has risen steadily. This new study addresses the contexts of his writing that are of greatest relevance to his place in modern poetry: his problematic relation to Ireland and his place in the largely English "thirties generation" with which he is often identified. The influence of these aspects on MacNeice's poetic development is studied in detail, addressing his relation to Yeats and Modernism and his conception of parable as a key imaginative response to these influences. Included also is the first study of the poet's revealing and...

Shakespeare's Romans are intensely concerned with "constancy." Geoffrey Miles traces the Stoic origins of this Roman principle of being "always the same" and explores the varying forms it takes in writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne. Building on this genealogy of constancy, Miles reads Shakespeare's Roman plays as reworkings of three figures found in Plutarch: the constant Brutus, the inconstant Antony, and the obstinate Coriolanus. The tragedies of these characters act out the attractions, flaws, and self-contradictions of constancy, and the tragicomic failure of the Roman hope...

The origins of many of the Icelandic sagas have long been the subject of critical speculation and controversy. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the relationship between verse and prose in saga narrative can be used to reconstruct how the sagas were composed. O'Donoghue provides a detailed analysis of Kormaks saga, revealing that far from being a seamless narrative of either pre-Christian oral tradition or later medieval fiction, the work is in fact a patchwork of different kinds of literary materials.

This study relates Conrad's work to the cultural crisis of the late nineteenth century, the post-Nietzschean phase of modernity. It discusses "faultlines"-- ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures-- in nine of the major novels and novellas. These faultlines are diagnosed as the symptoms of an unresolved tension between Conrad's temperamental affinity with the Nietzschean outlook and his fierce ideological rejection of its ultimate implications. Presenting Conrad as a modernist at war with modernity, the author studies the perpetual tug-of-war between the artistic will to meaning and the...

A Store of Common Sense is the first comparative study in English of Old Icelandic and Old English wisdom poetry. It examines problems of form, unity, and coherence, and how the genre responds to social change, both reflecting and shaping the thinking of the communities which originated it. Larrington's book explores the possibility of Christian influence on Norse texts and demonstrates the impact of Christian learning on the ancient pagan genre. The existence of a gnomic "key" in Norse and English narrative verse is also shown.

This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes toward history as a narrative model, moving from his early interest in "scientific" historiography to the radical, anti-historical character of his late works. These shifts can only be understood, the author argues, in terms of James's views on literary censorship and the politics of reading, and his engagement with the reading practices of marginalized groups: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde.

Mary Leapor (1722-1746), a Northamptonshire kitchen maid, produced a substantial body of exceptional poetry which was only published after her early death at the age of twenty-four. This is a timely examination of the work of a poet who has remained almost forgotten for 200 years. Leapor is one of many gifted poets, mainly women and laborers, whose work stands outside the traditional canon of eighteenth-century verse. Richard Greene draws on extensive primary research to present substantial new information about Leapor's life. He discusses her protests against the injustices suffered by women...