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

Copyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place?

Jody Greene argues that while "owning" one's book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early...

"The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825" reconstructs how eighteenth-century British readers invented further adventures for beloved characters, including Gulliver, Falstaff, Pamela, and Tristram Shandy. Far from being close-ended and self-contained, the novels and plays in which these characters first appeared were treated by many as merely a starting point, a collective reference perpetually inviting augmentation through an astonishing wealth of unauthorized sequels. Characters became an inexhaustible form of common property, despite their patent authorship. Readers endowed them with...

"The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution an age of mass-produced "Bank-paper" and "Book-paper." Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance paper that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls "the decline of the...

Helen Thompson's "Ingenuous Subjection" offers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or...

The Book of God is a penetrating study of the argument from design as it emerged and circulated in the romantic era. This argument holds that the intricacy and complexity of the natural world points to a divine designer and that nature is to be read as God's book. A literary and philosophical study of this idea, The Book of God revisits the familiar equation of romanticism, modernity, and secularization. Colin Jager eschews classic formulations of the thesis that societies secularize as they modernize, arguing instead that secularization is complexly interwoven with modernity...

Novels of the eighteenth century usually offer wedded bliss as a reward to their heroines. How did these novels affect and how were they affected by the women who were reading them? By drawing upon thousands of unpublished documents from the era, written by more than 250 women, Brophy creates a picture of the real lives of eighteenth-century women and then examines the work of seven novelists in relation to this portrait.

Excerpts from letters, diaries, and journals, written by women ranging from servants to nobility, reveal the stages of feminine life in the 1700s: dutiful daughter,...

From reviews of the first edition:
"Magical. The satisfying mood that this book creates, and sustains with near-total consistency throughout, carries the narrative flow as jocoseriously as Bell credits Joyce with doing in Ulysses. This is original, incisive, and enlightening criticism, a fresh approach to Ulysses that analyzes the levels and depths of its humor in a language that is consciously witty."--Bernard Benstock
"Bell joins the very thin ranks . . . of those critics who can both capture the humor of Ulysses and communicate its often serious function within the narrative. In...

"Breaks new ground for Joyceans. . . . Weaver's work embodies a perceptive, believable explication of Joyce's interpolation of verbal and musical modalities, and in the process makes the reader eminently aware of the interlocking nature of the two art forms."--Zack Bowen, University of Miami

Jack Weaver explains all of Joyce's writing in terms of music and evaluates the music--its form, kind, and technique--in each work. Using Joyce's own rhetoric of theme and variation, Weaver moves from one character to another, through the poems, fiction, and drama, noting improvisations and...

"A new way to discuss Joyce's nearly impossibly complex compositional habits. . . . Knowlton has so sensitized the reader to the issue of quotation that . . . she] permits discussions which have simply not been possible before."--Garry Leonard, University of Toronto

James Joyce never used quotation marks, calling them "perverted" and "unreal." This book springs from that aversion, presenting the first full account of citation from the ancient world forward and tracing Joyce's transgressive relation to that history from Memorabilia to Finnegans Wake.
Eloise Knowlton...

"The first comprehensive study of Joyce and the advertising/commodity nexus. . . . Provides the next step in understanding Joyce--for which Joyceans worldwide are ready and waiting. And it does so eloquently and persuasively and in enormously careful detail and depth of vision. . . . I love this book; I learned from this book. . . . An up-to-date and dramatically useful inquiry into Joycean modernism."--Cheryl Herr, University of Iowa

"The best book on Joyce I have read in years. . . . Leonard] offers new insights, novel readings, and creative interpretations on every page, and all...