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...

'Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers' is an edited collection of essays from leading authorities in the field of Victorian literature and science, including Gillian Beer and George Levine. The academic study of the interpenetration of Victorian literature and science has grown to be one of the largest and most dynamic areas in Victorian studies: in this collection, leading exponents in the field consider recent developments. The major figures and exact contemporaries, Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson are considered, in the company of John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Richard Owen, George...

'The Collected Works of Ann Hawkshaw' brings together Hawkshaw's four volumes of poetry and republishes them together for the first time. Some two hundred years after her birth into a large family of Dissenters in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the publication of 'The Collected Works' reflects the growing interest in Hawkshaw's poetry and life. As the span of three decades between the first and last examples of Hawkshaw's writing suggests, her poetry offers an exceptional insight into the changing political and religious landscape of the mid-nineteenth century. The themes of death,...

Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States. Many of the most famous American works of the nineteenth century that we know today -- such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick -- were not widely read when they first appeared. This collection seeks to offer its readers a glimpse at the literature that lit up the literary horizon when the works were first published, leading to insights on key cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century United...