Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social and religious critic.

Texas A&M University Press has released a paperback edition of "Czech Voices: Stories from ""Texas"" in the Amerikan narodni kalenda. "Originally published in 1991, "Czech Voices "comprises ten short memoir-essays written by some of the earliest Czech immigrants to Texas. Translated and edited by Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl, Jr., "Czech Voices" offers a clear window to the lives of Czech immigrants on a difficult frontier.
Each of the ten autobiographical sketches had been published in the "Amerikan narodni kalenda "(a Czech-language magazine in Chicago. (That publication s...

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social and religious critic.

Contains a selection of letters from the English poet Matthew Arnold.

Clinton Machann challenges recent popular approaches to the Victorian autobiography that treat the genre ahistorically or as a subgenre of fiction. Machann argues instead for considering these autobiographies intertextually and as a historically defined genre that can profitably be studied as nonfiction and as a referential art. The plots of Victorian autobiographies are highly variable in terms of developing motifs and tropes. Autobiographers undergo spiritual and mental crises, live out Romantic and biblical myths, follow historical and scientific paradigms and the dynamic patterns of their...