Thoughts Painfully Intense reads Hawthorne's fiction in the context of 19th-century medical and pseudomedical discourse. Many physicians, health reformers and lecturers, such as Chandler Robbins, Sylvester Graham, William Sweetster and Isaac Ray, believed that authors and scholars, particularly male authors and scholars, were vulnerable to nervous irritability, breakdown and paralysis. According to these authorities, men of letters, strained by intense study or lost in imaginative fantasies, became debilitated invalids. And, what was perhaps even more alarming, this debility could be...

This study examines the impact of scientific and sexologic theories on the creation of characters in the prose of two moderns, Hemingway and HD. While their literary forms were distinctly different, Deirdre Anne Pettipiece shows how their literary motives were very similar - being rooted in evolutionary theory.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines the often tragic and nearly always disabling metaphor of thetheatrum mundi, world-as-stage, as it plays itself out in the characters of Mary Shelley's novels.

This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work.
Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional notions of selfhood. As more conventional ways of thinking about consciousness became untenable, so too did...

Dickens was known for his incredible imagination and fiery social protest. This study shows how Dickens used the fairy tale to express his political and social views and helped establish it as an important literary genre for the Victorian public.

F. Scott Fitzgerald left behind a substantial body of work on New York, yet his city remains terra incognita - talked about but rarely well met. Lost City takes on this important and under-examined aspect of Fitzgerald's writing. Locating Fitzgerald's narratives in the context in which they were written, the author presents a detailed profile of the city and the urban civilization Fitzgerald knew - and in particular the Edwardian New York of Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Wharton. This work, informed by a skilful combination of literary criticism and cultural theory, provides an enlightening...

Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. "A New Matrix for Modernism" introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct women's poetic voice from the Bronte sisters through Alice Meynell to modernists Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham who combine feminist content with an innovative exploration of formalist prosody. Shifting emphasis from woman to child, mother to daughter, and urbs to suburb, relocating modernism's matrilingua to the boundaries of London society and...

A book that is at once obscure and brilliant, Ulysses was declared the most important book of the 20th century. It has also been the center of controversy off and on for over 75 years, most recently as the object of what was dubbed 'The Joyce Wars' in the late 1980s: the controversy over Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses: The Corrected Text . The author examines the Joyce Wars as a fascinating nexus of the conflicts between scholars and ordinary readers, and one that illuminates the existence of Ulysses - and by extension, Joyce - as an example of of Lyotard's differend, an icon that exists...

This study argues that this previously banned author devoted his entire life to articulating a religion of self-liberation in his autobiographical books, examining his life and work within the context of fringe religious movements that were linked with the avant-garde in New York City and Paris at the first of the 20^th century. This study shows how these transatlantic movements - including Gurdjieff, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy - gave him the hermeneutical devices, not to mention the creative license, to interpret texts and symbols from mainline religions in an iconoclastic...