Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Gothic & Romance

The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth collects 31 letters that William Wordsworth exchanged with his wife, Mary, during the early years of their marriage. These letters fifteen from William to Mary and sixteen from her to him were written during William's absences from home in 1810 and 1812 and offer an entirely new way of looking at the poet and his married life.

Reproduced here with an informative introduction and headnotes by Beth Darlington that set each missive in biographical context, the letters cover a wide range of topics: village life, Regency politics,...

Literary critics such as Virginia Woolf and Lionel Trilling had noted intuitive affinities between the art of Jane Austen and that of Mozart, but this 1983 book was the first to compare their artistic style and individual works in a comprehensive way. Extended comparisons are of course difficult because of the intrinsic differences between prose fiction and instrumental music.

In "Jane Austen and Mozart," Robert K. Wallace has succeeded in making illuminating comparisons of spirit and form in the work of these two artists. His book celebrates the achievements of Austen and Mozart by...

Edgar Allan Poe is a popular author, and students have often read his work by the time they reach the college or university classroom. His writings have inspired film, television, and musical adaptations--sources for much of students' knowledge about Poe. Thus the challenge for teachers is to reacquaint students with Poe as a complex literary figure. This volume equips teachers with the tools necessary to meet that challenge.

Part 1 identifies the most frequently taught Poe texts, reviews useful editions of his work, and suggests secondary sources on Poe as well as television, film,...

The very word -culture- has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea's beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea's development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of...

Edgar Allan Poe is a popular author, and students have often read his work by the time they reach the college or university classroom. His writings have inspired film, television, and musical adaptations--sources for much of students' knowledge about Poe. Thus the challenge for teachers is to reacquaint students with Poe as a complex literary figure. This volume equips teachers with the tools necessary to meet that challenge.

Part 1 identifies the most frequently taught Poe texts, reviews useful editions of his work, and suggests secondary sources on Poe as well as television, film,...

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children's literature.

The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children's literature, as a genre, was designed to keep...

Why are rocks and landforms so prominent in British Romantic poetry? Why, for example, does Shelley choose a mountain as the locus of a "voice . . . to repeal / large codes of fraud and woe"? Why does a cliff, in the boat-stealing episode of Wordsworth's Prelude, chastise the young thief? Why is petrifaction, or "stonifying," in Blake's coinage, the ultimate figure of dehumanization?

Noah Heringman maintains that British literary culture was fundamentally shaped by many of the same forces that created geology as a science in the period 1770 1820. He shows that landscape...

The ongoing critical fascination with Thomas De Quincey and the burgeoning recognition of the centrality of his writings to the Romantic age and beyond necessitates a critical examination of De Quincey. In this spirit, ten of the top De Quincey scholars in the world have come together in this volume to engage directly with the immense amount of new information to be published on De Quincey in the past two decades. The book features wide-ranging and incisive assessments of De Quincey as essayist, addict, economist, subversive, biographer, autobiographer, aesthete, innovator, hedonist, and...

Nineteenth-century periodicals frequently compared themselves to the imperial powers then dissecting the globe, and this interest in imperialism can be seen in the exotic motifs that surfaced in works by such late Romantic authors as John Keats, Charles Lamb, James Hogg, Letitia Landon, and Lord Byron. Karen Fang explores the collaboration of these authors with periodical magazines to show how an interdependent relationship between these visual themes and rhetorical style enabled these authors to model their writing on the imperial project.

Fang argues that in the decades after...

Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein "(1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men.

This volume brings together essays on Wollstonecraft s and Shelley s life writing by some of the most prominent scholars in Canada, Australia, and the United States. It also includes a full-length play by award-winning Canadian playwright Rose...

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare's late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes...