Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world...

Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition.

The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890...

A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery"...

In an earlier book Professor Krieger discussed the tragic vision as the confrontation with extremity--the writer's commitment to a master metaphor even as he acknowledges the incompleteness of that metaphor. The term -classic- is used here to indicate -the sense of restraint, of acceptance, of coming to terms with limitations self-imposed--as well as the awareness of the alternative one rejects in turning away from self-indulgence.- The writer is thus viewed as one who accepts the common use of language while he endeavors to defy it through metaphor, one who accepts classically the common...

Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from Barchester Towers and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle". They consider the Victorians' sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siecle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel,...

How did the creation of the -Other- woman in English narratives contribute to the displacement of sexuality onto the exotic or savage woman? How did this cultural invention reinforce the cult of domesticity at home? What were the social and economic forces driving the process? Among the first books to consider issues of empire in relation to literary texts of the eighteenth century, Torrid Zones offers a compelling revision of the history of feminism in a postcolonial context.

Felicity Nussbaum argues that the need to control women's sexuality in eighteenth-century England...

By championing the recovery of -lost- women writers and insisting on reevaluating the past, women's studies and feminist theory have effected dramatic changes in the ways English literary history is written and taught. In Writing Women's Literary History, Margaret Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. According to Ezell, by relying not only on past male scholarship but also on inherited notions of -tradition, - some feminist historicists...

On March 13, 1711, an article appeared in The Spectator about Thomas Inkle, a young and aspiring English trader cast ashore in the Americas, who is saved from violent death by Yarico, a beautiful Indian maiden. When he and Yarico become lovers, Inkle promises to clothe her in silks and transport her in carriages when he returns with her to England. Some months later, they are picked up after Yarico succeeds in signaling a passing English ship. But upon reaching Barbados, Inkle immediately sells Yarico into slavery--raising the price he demands when he learns that Yarico is pregnant...

The industrial revolution in nineteenth-century England disrupted traditional ways of life. Condemning these transformations, the male writers who explored the brave new world of Victorian industrialism looked longingly to an idealized past. However, British women writers were not so pessimistic and some even foresaw the prospect of real improvement. As Susan Zlotnick argues in Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, novelists Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were more willing to embrace industrialism than their male...

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of...

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing--from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social...

Originally published between 1932 and 1945, the eleven-volume Works of Edmund Spenser collects The Faerie Queene along with Spenser's minor poems, prose works, and Alexander C. Judson's The Life of Edmund Spenser.

Originally published between 1932 and 1945, the eleven-volume Works of Edmund Spenser collects The Faerie Queene along with Spenser's minor poems, prose works, and Alexander C. Judson's The Life of Edmund Spenser.