This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of nineteenth-century literature's relationship with science. In particular it brings the physical sciences--physics and chemistry--more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has been the case until now.
Writers whose work is discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some...

At the cusp of literary and cultural studies, this wide-ranging critical anthology reevaluates Victorian culture in the light of the literature of the period and vice versa. Also, essays by eminent and emerging Victorianists offer a reassessment, explicit and implicit, of Victorian studies and its methodologies.

Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Hopkins' poetry presents:

• extensive introductory comments on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of his work, from composition to the present
• annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews and critical works
• unabridged texts of twenty-nine of Hopkins' most important poems, with detailed annotations
• cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for futher...