Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Modern - 19th Century

Why did Charlotte Bronte go to such great lengths on the publication of her acclaimed, best-selling novel, Jane Eyre, to conceal its authorship from her family, close friends, and the press? In The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher tells the enthralling story of Bronte's compulsion to write her masterpiece and why she then turned around and vehemently disavowed it.

Few people know how quickly Bronte composed Jane Eyre. Nor do many know that she wrote it during a devastating and anxious period in her life. Thwarted in her passionate, secret, and...

'Before Einstein' examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of 'new' ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of...

This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves...

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott's novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus--the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards...

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 'Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney' argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. Its innovative study of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney shows that visuality - the continuum linking visual and verbal communication - provided...

This book investigates what it is that makes John Clare's poetic vision so unique, and asks how we use Clare for contemporary ends. It explores much of the criticism that has appeared in response to his life and work, and asks hard questions about the modes and motivations of critics and editors. Clare is increasingly regarded as having been an environmentalist long before the word appeared; this book investigates whether this 'green' rush to place him as a radical proto-ecologist does any disservice to his complex positions in relation to social class, work, agriculture, poverty and...

This book explores the significance of the now-lost pavilion built in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in the time of Queen Victoria for understanding experiments in British art and architecture at the outset of the Victorian era. It introduces the curious history of the garden pavilion, its experimental contents, the controversies of its critical reception, and how it has been digitally remediated. The chapters discuss how the pavilion, decorated with frescos and encaustics by some of the most prominent painters of the mid-nineteenth century, became the center of a national conversation...