A scientific detective story that illuminates the remarkable saga of Darwin's greatest achievement. Pairing Charles Darwin and a rare species of barnacle as her unlikely protagonists, Rebecca Stott has written an absorbing work of history that guides readers through the treacherous shoals of nineteenth-century biology. Beginning her scientific detective story in the 1820s, even before Darwin's Beagle voyage, Stott examines the mystery of why Darwin waited over two decades between formulating his pivotal theory of natural selection and publishing it. Lavishly illustrated, filled with riddles...

This volume provides students with an introduction to the poetry and life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most popular poets of her day in Britain and America who has become one of the great icons of Victorianism for the modern age.

This book examines the rise of the femme fatale as a prominant fictional type in late nineteenth-century British culture. As a stereotype she has been 'fabricated', that is to say constructed as a 'figure in the carpet' of the fin-de-siecle. The book argues that Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, Bram Stoker's female vampires and Conrad's destructive Malayan or African women, even Hardy's Tess, are all caught up in a series of late nineteenth-century contexts: biological determinism, imperialism, race, theories about female sexuality, degeneration and evolutionary theory."

This text covers the most significant areas of recent work on Tennyson, linking feminist and gender studies with deconstrcutive, psychoanalytic and linguistic attention. The essays in the book reflect a range of modes of critical inquiry compelling in themselves.