Offers a fresh and stimulating exploration of Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world - with other men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment, and with the supernatural.
Offers a fresh and stimulating exploration of Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the enc...
In this groundbreaking book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men, she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England.
In this groundbreaking book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studyi...
One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness, a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing, which seems inseparable from the mind's fading as it lets them go. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the young Yeats are elegists of the self; they render life as transparent, ghostlike, dissolving, ungraspable, nearly unrememberable. This vanishing away, this dimness, of Victorian poetry is most obvious in the twilights, mists, shadows, deep horizons, and flowing waters of its central landscape, but it is also a matter of sound and syntax, of repetition and...
One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness, a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing, which seems insepara...
Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of Tennyson's poetry to date. He proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading of Tennyson. In a series of original, scrupulously attentive, and sophisticated close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work. Focusing on the poet's most important early writings- fragments and poems produced from 1824 to 1833- Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights. Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of...
Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of Tennyson's poetry to date. He proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism a...
Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities....
Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem...
Conrad's major novels-Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes-tell of illusions and betrayals, dreams and lies. Ambiguity, contradiction, and irony so dominate the narratives that the more closely one reads, the more difficult it becomes to know what is real or what is true. While Conrad's impressionism teaches one to see, his irony casts doubt on the meaning of what one has seen. Facts have little value, yet beliefs are futile or hollow because they ignore facts. Irony turns every certainty into uncertainty. Even the cultural values upon which the irony seems to rest are...
Conrad's major novels-Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes-tell of illusions and betrayals, dreams and lies. Ambiguity, contra...
Matthew Arnold was one of the nineteenth century's greatest spokesmen for the saving power of culture, especially of poetry, to substitute for a vanishing religion. Yet he was persistently troubled throughout his career by the difficulty of finding adequate authority in language. Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language explores Arnold's attempts to find an authoritative language, and argues that his occasional claims for such a language reveal more uneasiness than confidence in the value of ""letters."" It examines Arnold's poetry within this context and demonstrates that his various...
Matthew Arnold was one of the nineteenth century's greatest spokesmen for the saving power of culture, especially of poetry, to substitute for a vanis...
For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention&emdash;-the loyal wife, good mother, and respected writer&emdash;-a reputation that led to her steady decline in the view of twentieth-century literary critics. Recent scholars, however, have begun to recognize that Mrs. Gaskell's high standing in Victorian society allowed her to effect change in conventional ideology. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund focus this reevaluation on issues pertaining to the Victorian literary marketplace.
Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays...
For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention&emdash;-the loyal wife, good mother, and respected...
"Albright contends that Tennyson's aesthetic goals were . . . in conflict'' and that his poetry attempts to unite two incompatible poetics, '' one governed by a heavenly muse, the other by an earthly muse suspicious of the idealizations and abstractions held dear by the first. The result is a poetry of myopia and astigmatism.'' With its neatly pursued argument and jargon-free text, this study offers many insights, though a readership fluently conversant with the Tennysonian opus (not just the major poems) is assumed. This is a good beginning for the Virginia Victorian Studies'' series, which...
"Albright contends that Tennyson's aesthetic goals were . . . in conflict'' and that his poetry attempts to unite two incompatible poetics, '' one gov...
Despite feminist reassessments to the contrary, the conventional view that Elizabeth Gaskell personified the Victorian feminine ideal is still very much in place today. Challenging that view in an experimental biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there lived in ""Mrs. Gaskell"" another, antithetical self, a daemonic double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature born to be a ""gypsy-bachelor."" Bonaparte does not dispute that ""Mrs. Gaskell"" did exist, but she suggests that Gaskell conceived her, as much as any fictional character, out of a desperate need produced by...
Despite feminist reassessments to the contrary, the conventional view that Elizabeth Gaskell personified the Victorian feminine ideal is still very mu...
