Drawing on a wide range of Dickens's writings, including all of his novels and a selection of his letters, journalism, and shorter fiction, Dickens, Family, Authorship provides a provocative account of the evolution of an author from whose psychological honesty and imaginative generosity emerged precocious fictional portents of Freudian and post-Freudian theory. The decade 1843-1853 was pivotal in Dickens's career. A phase of feverish activity on both personal and professional fronts, it included the irrevocable souring of his relations with his parents, the peripatetic residence in...

At its height, during the 1830s and 40s, Chartism inspired a prodigious literary output, based on its own newspapers and journals. While some Chartist political writings have been reprinted, the fiction of the movement has been largely neglected. Chartist stories represent a unique moment in literary history, when the radical political energies of a mass movement were fused with popular narrative forms. The result was a vital, accessible and popular fiction, informed by an awareness that Chartism had to forge its own brand of fiction in order to challenge the prevailing cultural...

Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice is a groundbreaking study, which transforms contemporary critical understanding of The Excursion and of the place of this long poem in the Wordsworthian canon. Sally Bushell argues that the poem, which has suffered at the hands of critics for most of the twentieth century, has been unfairly judged according to a Coleridgean rather than a Wordsworthian definition of "philosophy"-that it has been read as a didactic work, rather than one which uses its dramatic form to teach its readers to think for themselves. ...

Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry for the first time locates Hopkins and his work within the vital aesthetic and religious cultures of his youth. It introduces some of the most powerful cultural influences on his poetry as well as some of the most influential poets, from the well-known fellow convert John Henry Newman to the almost forgotten historian and poet Richard Dixon. From within the context of Hopkins' developing catholic sensibilities it assesses the impact of and his responses to issues of the time which related to his own religious and aesthetic perceptions, and provides...

This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses...

The Romantic Era witnessed a series of conflicts concerning definitions of health and disease. In this book, Martin Wallen discusses those conflicts and the cultural values that drove them. The six chapters progress from the mainstream rejuvenation of the Socratic values by Wordsworth and Coleridge to the radical alternatives offered by the Scottish theorist, John Brown, and the speculative German philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling. Wallen shows how actual definitions of health and disease changed at the turn of the nineteenth century, and provides an analysis of the metaphorical uses to which...

Authors whose works are discussed in this collaborative book, covering a 'long' nineteenth century, include Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence. Most of the chapters focus on a single work, among them Tristram Shandy, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Middlemarch and Lord Jim, asking why, in the end, does this novel matter, and what does it invite us to 'see'. The contributors examine aspects of narrative technique which are crucial to interpretation, and which bring something new or distinctive into...

This study collects together many of the original texts from the long-running debate which surrounded the rise of English as an academic subject. Most of the texts were ephemeral and have been long out of print, but they are essential to an understanding of how English studies developed. They show how English was influenced by pre-existing subjects like rhetoric and classics, and how it assumed different faces in different academic institutions. Each text is given an introduction which sets it in context and highlights themes. A general introduction to the book sketches the history of...

This is the definitive textual analysis of all of Hardy's collected short stories, tracing the development of each from manuscript, through newspaper serial versions, galley proofs and revises to collected editions in volume form. It is no surprise to discover that Hardy's capacity for inveterate revision is manifested in his tales as it was in his novels. Even those stories for which he professed little regard were meticulously and continuously revised, in some cases more than thirty years after their first publication. The alterations extend to the most minute details of plot, landscape,...

The text of the book consists of some 150 letters (out of a corpus of 2,500) written by the late nineteenth-century poet, critic, editor and journalist W.E. Henley, to various figures of the period, e.g. R.L. Stevenson, H. G. Wells, J.M. Barrie, William Archer, Rodin, Wilde, Kipling, Arthur Morrison, Alice Meynell, and Edmund Gosse. Letters are also included to other figures within Henley’s immediate circle, his wife Anna, his financial backer Fitzroy Bell, Charles Baxter the arbitrator in the quarrel between Henley and Stevenson, and his Edinburgh art collector friend Hamilton Bruce. Each...