Sara Crewe, an exceptionally intelligent and imaginative student at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies, is devastated when her adored, indulgent father dies. Now penniless and banished to a room in the attic, Sara is demeaned, abused, and forced to work as a servant. How this resourceful girl's fortunes change again is at the center of A Little Princess, one of the best-loved stories in all of children's literature. This unique and fully annotated edition appends excerpts from Frances Hodgson Burnett's original 1888 novella Sara Crewe and the stage play...
Sara Crewe, an exceptionally intelligent and imaginative student at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies, is devastated when her adored, in...
As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age. "Forbidden...
As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive...
Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as "Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy" lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." "Ventures into Childland" will delight and...
Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as "Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy" lurks the specter of an intense gender debate...
MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous one, first told in the introduction Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel. The two Shelleys, Byron, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori (Byron's physician) spent a "wet, ungenial summer in the Swiss Alps." Byron suggested that "each write a ghost story." If one is to trust Mary Shelley's account (and James Rieger has shown the untrustworthiness of its chronology and particulars), only she and "poor...
MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous on...
Famous Last Words traces a broad historical transition- from the 1840s to the 1980s- from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of twentieth-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally allow alternative constructions of gender as well as plot.
Each essay treats a narrative- novel, novella, or novel poem- by a single author in light of conventions of closure and of gender in historical context. The contributors recover forgotten...
Famous Last Words traces a broad historical transition- from the 1840s to the 1980s- from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which...
"Wuthering Heights" at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Bronte presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novel s concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in...
"Wuthering Heights" at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This s...
Contents: I. Religion, evolution, and the novel; 1. 1888 and a look backwards; 2. George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler: three types of search; II. George Eliot: the search for a religious tradition; 1. George Eliot and science; 2. George Eliot and the "higher criticism"; 3. George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and tradition; III. Middlemarch: the balance of a progress; 1. "Heart" and "mind": two forms of progress; 2. "Modes of religion" (a); 3. Modes of religion" (b); 4. The "metaphysics" of Middlemarch; IV. Daniel Deronda: tradition as synthesis and salvation; 1. Middlemarch and the two...
Contents: I. Religion, evolution, and the novel; 1. 1888 and a look backwards; 2. George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler: three types of sea...
