In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley, and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors or works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs. This is a literary period in which literature fully entered the marketplace, and in which an ideology was constitued - civic, domestic, Christian and imperial - that was to inform...

Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel. The full implications of its hidden plot are only revealed by a second reading. Presented here for the first time with the spelling and the punctuation of the first edition of 1816, the text allows readers to see the novel as Austen's contemporaries first encountered it. The volume includes comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, and a chronology of Austen's life as well. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.

This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.

• Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems
  
• Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts.
  
• Explores the relationships between work by different poets
  
• Recalls attention to a...

This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.

• Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems
  
• Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts.
  
• Explores the relationships between work by different poets
  
• Recalls attention to a...

This book investigates what happens to the English language when it seeks to accommodate India and what happens to India when it is accommodated within the language of a far-off European country. It explores the work of writers from Kipling to Salman Rushdie, Ghandhi to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

This study of the literary culture in Britain in the years after Waterloo begins with an account of two fatal duels, the famous duel of 16 February 1821, in which John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, fell, and the less well known duel of 26 March 1822, in which Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer, was killed. These duels, Richard Cronin suggests, bring into sharp focus the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Waterloo. The book ranges widely but at its centre are the three literary phenomena that best define the period: Walter Scott's novels, Byron's...

Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems from the Victorian era by a renowned scholar. The selection includes a range of canonical and lesser known writers

• Skilfully conveys the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry
• Offers an ideal balance of canonical and less well-known writers

• Allows readers to explore the poetry of the Victorian era, through the eyes of one of the most renowned scholars in the field

• Poets covered include Matthew Arnold, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning,...

This volume, first published in 2005, is a fully annotated scholarly edition of the 1816 edition of Emma.

The Robert Browning volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning to offer a wide selection of work written throughout Browning's career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died. The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the volume also constitutes a kind of biography. It reveals a poet who began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment throughout a...