This page contains descriptions of recently released or forthcoming print and electronic texts related to the Romantic period (only purchasable e-texts are included; see Voice of the Shuttle: English Literature--Romantic for free online texts). Descriptions are the publisher's/author's jacket notice or other publicity literature minus any reviewers' "blurbs." At the end of each year, descriptions included here will be moved to an archive (still to be created). To contribute to this page, please send an e-mail message to Alan Liu with citations and jacket descriptions according to the following format. Publishers and authors may also help by sending notification when a book currently listed as forthcoming is published. (Page last revised 4/23/96)
Alan Liu keeps the Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research, which includes a complex of Literature (English) subpages.
PUBLISHED IN 1995
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John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices
Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of GothicFORTHCOMING (with descriptions and/or tables of contents)
PUBLISHED IN 1995JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This is the first full-scale study of the drawings and paintings of the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell, including
the first catalogue of all known Brontë illustrations, published and unpublished. The Art of the Brontës comprises almost 400 illustrated
entries, recording such details as medium, dating, provenance, sources, style, and arguments for attribution; and documenting many previously unknown drawings
and paintings. In addition, a sequence of narrative chapters provides new material on each of the four Brontë siblings and their relationships to the
visual arts, suggesting ways in which their experience of drawing influenced their writing. An annotated and illustrated catalogue which is also a work of
scholarly criticism, this publication is a landmark in Brontë studies and in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and painting generally.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, including some
of the most celebrated texts in Sade scholarship, now made available to English-language readers for the first time. It focuses on several distinctly
contemporary areas of interest: the explicitly libidinal components of Sade's work and the effects they engender, the textual and narrative apparatus which
supports these operations, the ethical and political concerns which arise from them, and the problematic issues surrounding the conceptual closure of
representation. Sade is placed at the centre of current debates in literary and philosophical criticism, feminist and gender theory, aesthetics, rhetoric and
eighteenth-century French cultural history, and this volume will be of interest to a wide range of readers across these disciplines.
Contributors: Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Roger, Alphonso Lingis, Jane Gallop, Marcel Hénaff, Dalia Judowitz, Allen S. Weiss, Nancy K. Miller, Lawrence Schehr, Chantal Thomas
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Napoleon Bonaparte occupied a central place in the consciousness of many British writers of the Romantic period. He was a profound
shaping influence on their thinking and writing, and a powerful symbolic and mythic figure whom they used to legitimise and discredit a wide range of political
and aesthetic positions. In this first ever full-length study of Romantic writers' obsession with Napoleon, Simon Bainbridge focuses on the writings of the
Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and of Byron and Hazlitt. Combining detailed analyses of specific texts with broader historical and theoretical
approaches, and illustrating his argument with the visual evidence of contemporary cartoons, Bainbridge shows how Romantic writers constructed, appropriated and
contested different Napoleons as a crucial part of their sustained and partisan engagement in the political and cultural debates of the day.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
How do we account for the kind of poetry Wordsworth produced? Wordsworth and Feeling returns to Wordsworth's personal
history in order to locate and contextualize some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language. In this study, G. Kim Blank details how this poetry
evolves out of Wordsworth's radical subjectivity, but the most pressing feature of that subjectivity is the cluster of subjects--loss, guilt, suffering,
endurance, death--which appears throughout much of his poetry up until 1802-4.
Wordsworth did not write out a particular convention, nor is a great deal of this early poetry primarily concerned with social, political, spiritual, or philosophical issues. It is his inner life that demands and receives therapeutic expression in his poetry, an inner life and internal voice enmeshed with and determined by feelings that are deeply disturbing.
The traumatic events of his childhood and early adult life come back to him and are communicated via many poetic voices; not surprisingly, these recovered memories also show up in psychosomatic illness. But despite the variety of these voices, the cluster of negative subjects and feelings remains constant, pervasive, and troubling. As he matures, and the circumstances in his life become more favorable, he is, in his poetry, able to bring meditated thought over to these difficult feelings, and thus free himself from the burden of his past. As he makes personal changes, so does his poetry change: cast in such a light, it is possible to say that as Wordsworth became a stronger person, he also became a weaker poet, though it may be fairer to say he became a changed poet. Blank passionately returns Wordsworth to a scene of poetic production that much modern criticism has overlooked, perhaps even denied.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion
that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons
applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes,
and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to
Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of
disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls's study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in
Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment, but produced a string of
bestsellers. E. J. Clery's original and historically sensitive account charts the troubled entry of the supernatural into fiction, and examines the reasons for
its growing popularity in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with the notorious case of the Cock Lane ghost, a performing poltergeist who became a major
attraction in the London of 1762, and with Garrick's spell-binding performance as the ghost-seeing Hamlet, it moves on to look at the Gothic novels of Horace
Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis and others, in unexpected new lights. The central insight emerging from the rich resources of Clery's research concerns the
connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism. Not only are ghost stories successful commodities in the rapidly commercialising
book market, they are also considered here as reflections on the disruptive effects of this socio-economic transformation. In providing a newly detailed
context for the rise of supernatural fiction, Clery's work will change our view of its dramatic role--as much commercial as creative--in the movement from
Enlightenment to Romanticism.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Women Writing About Money addresses the paradoxical nature of the women of Jane Austen's time who had no legal access to
money yet were held responsible for domestic expenditure. In this context, money becomes a major issue in women's fiction, along with the legal disabilities
suffered by women, and the restrictions imposed by rank. The book translates the fictional money of the novels of Jane Austen's day into the power of
contemporary spendable incomes. From the perspective of what the British pound could buy at the market, the economic lives of women in the novels emerge as
part of a general picture of women's economic disability. Through the work of both well-known and less canonical writers such as Austen, Edgeworth, Eliza
Parsons, and Sarah Green, as well as writers of magazine fiction, Women Writing About Money examines the professional lives of women authors, the kinds
of publishers who would publish their work, the profits they could expect to receive, and the specific demands of their different reading publics. By linking
authorship to the economic lives of contemporary women, Women Writing About Money links the fantasy worlds of women's fiction with the social and
economic realities of both readers and writers.
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Leigh Hunt has long been stigmatized as Keats's evil genius, a superficial and mannered poet whose influence can be observed
in such early poems as l Stood Tip-Toe and Sleep and Poetry
. His portrayal as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House has also fostered an impression of triviality and selfishness in the minds of those who do not trouble to
read him.
Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy, so far the only book devoted exclusively to his verse, takes issue with these received opinions and argues that,
overshadowed by the work of his more gifted contemporaries, Hunt's output has suffered repeatedly from invidious comparisons.
Author Rodney Stenning Edgecombe suggests that we need to bring his admittedly minor poetry out of the shadows and, approaching it on its own sunny terms, find a way of enjoying its slightness and delicate charm. With this in mind, Edgecombe urges that we approach the poet as a rococo artist, using this aesthetic category to legitimize and focus the decorative impulse that informs his vision, and the escapism that sometimes led him, as a poet, to skirt many of the issues he so bravely fought for through his Radical journalism.
Like Wordsworth, Hunt divided his output into loose generic categories when he began preparing a select edition of his poetry toward the end of his life, categories retained and amplified by H. S. Milford in his 1923 edition. Edgecombe has used these divisions as a way of organizing his study, and also of illustrating the immense range of forms and genres that the poet explored in the course of a long career. He furthermore offers close readings of many seminal poems in an effort to show that Hunt, dismissed by Carlyle as a sort of poetic "tinker," was a generally creditable craftsperson, and that when the occasion inspired him, he could write very well indeed.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Bronte, Tennyson,
Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde. Rather than treating influence in terms of source study or of intersubjective struggle, it demonstrates how institutions
of cultural production mediate the access that later writers have to earlier ones. These institutions produced a ritual of the Victorian authorial career in
which writers repeatedly defined themselves against what they understood Byron to represent. In many cases, they did not reject him outright. Instead, they
created fictions of personal development away from values associated with Byron towards those associated with themselves as mature Victorian writers.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This volume provides a variety of critical and historical perspectives on a remarkable body of imaginative work that has been
virtually ignored during most of this century--writing by British women during the era traditionally called Romantic. These essays, the editors note, "are
the best critical warrant we have to ensure that the Romantic canon is not reopened in one direction only to be closed in another."
Contributors to the volume consider the achievements of women poets, novelists, nonfiction prose writers, composers actors, playwrights, and authors of books for children. In doing so, they examine such topics as the formulation of the canon, the rhetoric of gender, and the difficulty of reconciling embedded notions of femininity with careers in patriarchal culture.
Contributors include: Isobel Armstrong, Stephen Behrendt, Catherine B. Burroughs, Moira Ferguson, Anthony John Harding, Susan Levin, William McCarthy, Jeanne Moskal, Mitzi Myers, Judith Pascoe, Judith Pike, Richard C. Sha, Susan Wolfson and the editors. (13 essays and an introduction)
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal--and
most controversial--theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second time. In 1987, a Belgian
scholar discovered that de Man had written in the early 1940s for several journals that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium.
The revelations precipitated debates that have yet to subside.
The scholar who set loose this furor was Ortwin de Graef, who has since embarked on a comprehensive survey of de Man's writings. The first book, Serenity in Crisis, covered de Man's career from 1939 to 1960. Titanic Light examines de Man's work from the 1960s.
Titanic Light concentrates on de Man's increased interest during the 1960s in Romantic (and post-Romantic) literature and criticism. De Graef follows in detail de Man's strong readings of the works of Hölderlin, Rousseau and Wordsworth. He connects de Man's interpretations of these and other writers with his earlier critical works and his later deconstructive writings. In addition, de Graef places de Man's essays from the 1960s (some later collected in the influential volume Blindness and Insight) in the context of the critical debates of that era--debates about structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, American New Criticism, and other critical schools.
The result is a penetrating portrait of a critic who, during the sixties, reached full maturity as an interpreter of literature and contemporary criticism. Combining sympathy and skepticism for its subject, Titanic Light continues what is already the most insightful, thorough, and balanced examination of de Man's intellectual career.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This book focuses on Pushkin's use of the Romantic fragment, especially the link between the fragment and Romantic irony's
questioning of the sources and intentionality of language. In the view of Friedrich Schlegel, 'identity' does not precede speech, but is forged in each
improvisational interaction with interlocutor or reader. One finds out who one is by speaking, and all utterances and texts stand in a fragmentary, contingent
relation to an accumulating life-text. Pushkin may come closest of all major European poets to realising what Schlegel prescribed as the poetics of modernity,
because as common latecomers on the European scene, Russian and German writers shared a fascination with European fashions, and a talent for conflating or
stepping outside them.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Recent studies of the concepts and ideologies of Romanticism have neglected to examine the ways in which Romanticism defined itself
by reconfiguring its literary past. In Wordsworth's Pope Robert J. Griffin shows that many of the basic tenets of Romanticism derive from
mid-eighteenth-century writers' attempts to free themselves from the literary dominance of Alexander Pope. As a result, a narrative of literary history in
which Pope figured as an alien poet of reason and imitation became the basis for nineteenth-century literary history, and still affects our thinking on Pope and
Romanticism. Griffin traces the genesis and transmission of 'Romantic literary history,' from the Wartons to M. H. Abrams; in so doing, he calls into question
some of our most basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
"My Hideous Progeny": Mary SheIley, Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship is a study of the influence
of William Godwin on his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. "My Hideous Progeny" explores Godwln's unsettling psychological legacy--and his
generous intellectual gifts--to his daughter. The relationship between Mary Shelley and her father illustrates a typical pattern of female development and a
typical course of father-daughter relatlonships over a lifetime. Mary Shelley's response to her father's influence is unforgettably portrayed in the flgure of
the father in the pages of her novel.
William Godwin, a radical political philosopher and novelist, brought up the. daughter he had with his lover Mary Wollstonecraft to be a thinker and writer. Unusual for the times, he trained her in literature, history, and the power of the rational mind. Yet as Mary Woilstonecraft Godwin grew into womanhood, her once supportive father rejected her. He distanced himself from her physically and emotionally during her adolescence, perhaps because of the incestuous feelings her developing womanhood called up. After Mary Godwin eloped to France at age sixteen with the married, atheistic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Godwin refused to speak with his daughter for almost two years. After Percy Shelley's death by drowning, Godwin changed once again: he relied on Mary Shelley heavily for emotional comfort and sustenance, and made it clear he wanted her continued financial support. Mary Shelley and her father maintained an intimate, troubled relationship until the day he died.
William Godwin's influence on Mary Shelley pervades her novels, especially in the figure of the father. Her first two novels, Frankenstein and Mathilda, are both energized by the question of father-daughter incest. In Frankenstein, the spurned, abandoned monster can be viewed as a figure for a child made loathsome by the father's incestuous desire. Mary Shelley uses Frankenstein to chart the way a daughter can vent her rage on the figure of the father and eventually gain control over him. Mathilda focuses more directly then Frankenstein on the question of father-daughter incest; it is remarkable for its vivid portrayal of the ambivalent emotions of incest victims.
Mary Shelley's last two novels, Lodore and Falkner, treat the problematic nature of the father-daughter relationship with equal skill. Lodore shows the crippling effects of a father's "sexual education" on his daughter---as well as the enabling power for a daughter when her father educates her instead in reason and the abstract powers of the mind. Falkner is the drama of a father figure and daughter locked in a relationship of passionate mutual devotion. Mary Shelley's final novel is a portrait of sexual conflict in which Rupert Falkner is tragically responsible for Elizabeth Raby's suffering--just as Elizabeth punishes and undermines her adopted father.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Literature in the Marketplace is a wide-ranging innovative collection of essays that addresses important issues in cultural
studies and the history of the book. Drawing on speech-act, reader response, and gender theory in addition to various historical, narratological, materialist,
and bibliographical perspectives, the chapters consider different texts throughout the nineteenth century. Topics studied include market trends, modes of
publication, the use of pseudonyms by women writers, readerships and reading ideologies, periodical literature, copyright law, and colonial distribution. The
volume examines a wide range of printed materials, from valentines, advertisements, illustrations, and fashionable annuals, to the more traditional genres of
poetry, fiction, and periodical essays. The authors examined include Wordsworth, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Meredith, and Walter Pater.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1 Introduction: Publishing History as Hypertext (John O. Jordan & Robert L. Patten)
2 Some Trends in British Book
Production, 1800-1919 (Simon Eliot)
3 Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829 (Peter J. Manning)
4 Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth,
1850-1900 (Stephen Gill)
5 Sam Weller's Valentine (J. Hillis Miller)
6 Serialized Retrospection in The Pickwick Papers (Robert L. Patten)
7 Textual/Sexual Pleasure and Serial Publication (Linda K. Hughes & Michael Lund))
8 The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals (Kelly J. Mays)
9
How Historians Study Reader Response; Or, What did Jo Think of Bleak House? (Jonathan Rose)
10 Dickens in the Visual Market (Gerard Curtis)
11
Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England (Catherine A. Judd)
12 A Bibliographical Approach to Victorian Publishing (Maura Ives)
13
The "Wicked Westminster," the Fortnightly, and Walter Pater's Renaissance (Laurel Brake)
14 Serial Fiction in Australian
Colonial Newspapers (Elizabeth Morrison)
Index
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This is a provocative account of Wordsworth's representation of walking as the exercise of imagination that traces a recurrent
analogy between the poet in search of material and the literally dispossessed vagrants and beggars he encounters. Reading Wordsworth - and Rousseau before him
- from the perspectives of current debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are
surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the 'negative freedom' at the heart of liberalism. Langan shows how the formal structure of the Romantic poem - the
improvisational excursion - mirrors its apparent themes, often narratives of impoverishment or abandonment. According to Langan, the encounter between the
beggar and the passerby in Wordsworth's poetry does not simply reveal a social conscience or its lack; it represents the advent of the liberal subject, whose
identity is stretched out between origin and destination, caught between economic and political forces and the workings of desire.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and
effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, showing through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings (from his early American journalism
onwards) the complexity, self-consciousness and skill of his stylistic procedures. Her close readings examine the political implications of Cobbett's style
within the broader context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political prose, and argue that his perceived ideological and stylistic
flaws--inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia-- are in fact rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarized reading
audiences. Cobbett's ability to imagine and to address socially divided readers within a single text, the book argues, constitutes a politically disruptive
challenge to prevailing political and social assumptions about their respective rights, duties, needs and abilities. This rereading revises a prevailing
critical consensus that Cobbett is an unselfconscious populist whose writings reflect rather than challenge the ideological paradoxes and problems of his time.
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
In this first extended critical study of William Wordsworth's versecraft, Brennan O'Donnell explores the connection between
what Wordsworth called the "innumerable minutiae" of the art of poetry--form, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration--and its broader thematic,
aesthetic, and philosophical concerns. He focuses on the issues of form and composition in Wordsworth's theory of poetry to establish the relationship between
the poet's attempt to incorporate into his work the language of "common life" and the complex, conventional metrical patterns in which he presented
that language. In particular, O'Donnell emphasizes the importance of hearing Wordsworth's poems as sonic performances in time beyond merely reading them on a
page.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Exploring how the concept of the imagination is figured in some principal texts of English Romanticism, this book convincingly
argues that this figuring is a deeply ideological activity which reveals important social and political investments. By attending to the textual figures of the
imagination, the book sheds critical light not only on Romanticism but on the very workings of ideology.
To demonstrate his thesis, the author undertakes critical re-readings of four major Romantic authors--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats--and shows how the legacy of ideology and imagination is reflected in the novels of George Eliot. He shows that for each of these writers, the imagination is neither a faculty that can be presumed nor one idea among others; it is something that must be theorized and, in Coleridge's words, "instituted." Once instituted, Coleridge asserts, the imagination can address England's fundamental social antagonisms and help restore national unity. More pointedly, the institution of the imagination is the cornerstone of a "revolution in philosophy" that would prevent the importation of a more radical--and more French--political revolution.
In the process of re-reading the Romantic tradition, the author undertakes a critical reconsideration of the articulations between Marxism and deconstruction, particularly as expressed in the work of Louis Althusser and Paul de Man. The book brushes against the grain of the prevailing historicist mood in Romantic studies--established by such critics as Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler, and Alan Liu--which explores the historical contexts of Romanticism in order to reveal its ideologies. The Ideology of Imagination demonstrates that we can only begin to understand the meaning and nature of ideology by returning to its implication with the imagination in Romantic texts themselves.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and
politics. But recent critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption.
Keats and History brings together exciting new work by British and American scholars in thirteen essays which respond to recent interest in the
historical dimensions of Keats' poems and letters, and open fresh perspectives on his achievement. Keats' writings are approached through politics, social
history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to
nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century readings of the poet.
Contributors: Martin Aske, John Barnard, Kelvin Everest, Terence Allan Hoagwood, Theresa M. Kelley, John Kerrigan, Greg Kucich, Vincent Newey, Michael O'Neill, Nicholas Roe, Nicola Trott, Daniel P. Watkins, Susan J. Wolfson.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Based on compelling new research and drawing on recent developments in literary and historical studies, The Theatres of War
reveals the importance of the theatre in the shaping of responses to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Gillian Russell explores the roles
of the army and navy as both actors and audiences, showing that theatricality was crucial to the self-perception of soldiers and sailors fighting on behalf of
an often distant domestic audience.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815 had profound consequences for British society, politics, and culture. In this first in-depth study of the cultural dimension of these conflicts, Gillian Russell reveals theatricality to have been central to the British experience of war. The theatre emerges as a place where battles were celebrated in the form of spectacular reenactments and where the tensions of mobilization on an hitherto unprecedented scale were played out in the form of riots and disturbances. Soldiers and sailors were actively engaged in such shows, taking to the stage as actors in the theatres of Britain, in ships off Portsmouth, and in the garrisons and battlefields of continental Europe and the empire.
A lively and original book, The Theatres of War is a major contribution to the "new" cultural history.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
This study argues that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the rise of a modern market economy in which the
text became commodified into a material object--the book--writers fought against a perceived loss of authority by developing a theory of the rhetorical Sublime.
Like the sacramental presence in the Christian church, the realm of the Sublime allowed the reader an opportunity for incorporation in a spiritual communion
with an immaterial text offered by a disembodied authorial presence.
Drawing on the phenomenology of reading and the cultural dynamics of gift-indebtedness and sacramentalism, Charles J. Rzepka advances his argument through a detailed examination of the life and work of writer and opium addict Thomas De Quincey. The book offers both a psychobiography of De Quincey and a fresh study of the evolution of his ideas from early childhood up to the publication of his masterwork, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
George Crabbe: A Reappraisal is centered on the belief that Crabbe, particularly in his verse-tales, is an important, even
major, poet whose work has been and still is seriously undervalued.
After an introductory chapter, the next five chapters in Part 1 offer a straightforward account of the changes in Crabbe's poetry up to its pinnacle of achievement in 1812, tracing its development from the generalized discursive poetical essays of the 1780s through the particularized character sketches and anecdotes of The Parish Register and much of The Borough to the full-length verse-tales that reach their full maturity in Tales (1812). The most important factors leading to this striking change in his poetic practice are outlined, and an attempt is made to specify the characteristics of the mature tales that give them their enduring value and appeal. A further chapter records the gradual decline of Crabbe's powers as manifested in his two final volumes, Tales of the Hall and Posthumous Tales.
The second section of the book reopens the discussion of Crabbe's work from a set of slightly altered perspectives. Thus one chapter is concerned with the work of the first generation of Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) and suggests that some of the energy and tension of Crabbe's mature poetry comes from his readiness to expose himself, sensitively yet not uncritically, to the new currents of feeling that were stirring in England around the turn of the century. Another chapter carefully explores the complex question of how far Crabbe can justly be regarded as a "realistic" poet, and concludes that the concrete detail in Crabbe's tales is justified not only by its conformity with "reality," but it is also almost invariably fully integrated into a narrative structure whose thrust is directed not towards "realism" (in the Barthesian sense) but towards the more time-honored goal of "poetic truth." Other chapters deal with the question of genre, with the claim that Crabbe's determinate meanings (often thought to be peculiarly translucent) can be reduced to indeterminacy by a deconstructive approach, and with the extent to which "ideology" governed his social and political outlook. A concluding chapter takes as its perspective the attempt to set Crabbe's total oeuvre in the context of what we know about his life and personality. And although the poet's actual life and experience are not, for the most part, reflected directly in more than a few of his poems, in the impression that was concealed beneath, yet lent energy to, the calmly controlled surface of his poetic world there may lie an internal conflict and strain that enhance the attractiveness of this fine and still-neglected poet.
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Art of Darkness is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five
centuries and including tales as diverse as Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Shelley's Frankenstein, Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, Coleridge's
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the "plots" of Sigmund Freud, and the recent Alien films, Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that
Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic
represent a single literary tradition.
Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kresteva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family. She then identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: in the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world that, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Wiliams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics. Lucidly and gracefully written, Art of Darkness alters our understanding of the Gothic tradition, of Romanticism, and of the relations between gender and genre in literary history.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Romanticism: A Critical Reader is designed both as a companion and a supplement to Blackwell's Romanticism: An Anthology.
It deals for the most part with works included in that volume while affording coverage to key elements, including fiction, beyond the anthologist's scope to
include. Most of the movements and schools of thought active during the last fifteen years are represented, including feminism, new historicism, genre theory,
psychoanalysis, and dconstructionism. The Reader
provides thus a progress report, useful to anyone interested in the application of theoretical ideas to literary texts, giving a unique overview of
Romantic studies since 1980.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
A Note on Texts and Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Blake
1 Blakean Zen
(1985), Nelson Hilton
2 Blake's Concept of the Sublime (1991), Vincent Arthur De Luca
Wordsworth
3 Wordsworth, Rousseau and the Politics
of Education (1984), James K. Chandler
4 The History in "Imagination" (1989), Alan Liu
Coleridge
5 "Kubla Khan" and the
Art of Thingifying" (1981), Kathleen M. Wheeler
6 "Christabel": The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form" (1984), Karen Swann
Shelley
7 Adonais: Shelley's Consumption of Keats (1984), James A. W. Heffernan
8 Deconstruction or Reconstruction: Reading Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound (1990), Tilottama Rajan
Byron
9 Don Juan and Byron's Imperceptiveness to the English Word (1990), Peter J. Manning
10
Byron and the Anonymous Lyric (1993), Jerome J. McGann
Keats
11 The Two Hyperions: Compositions and Decompositions (1985), Balachandra
Rajan
12 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes (1985), Leon Waldoff
Other Writers
13 Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams
(1982), Marilyn Butler
14 Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1985), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
15 Bearing Demons:
Frankenstein's Circumvention of the Maternal (1986), Margaret Homans
16 John Clare in Babylon (1992), Tom Paulin
17 A Revolution in Female Manners
(1993), Anne K. Mellor
18 Jane Austen and Empire (1993), Edward Said
List of Contributors
Bibilography
Index
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
Examination of the relationship between science and literary history is providing valuable new insights for scholars across a range
of disciplines. In Wordsworth and the Geologists John Wyatt explores the unexpectedly close relationship between a major Romantic poet and a group of
scientists in the formative years of a new discipline, geology. Wordsworth's later poems display extensive knowledge of geology and a preoccupation with
philosophical issues concerned with the developing science of geology. Letters and diaries of leading geologists of the time reveal that they knew, and
discussed their subject, with Wordsworth. Wyatt's study challenges the simplistic version of 'two cultures,' the Romantic-literary against the
scientific-materialistic, and reminds us of the variety of inter-relating discourses current between 1807 (the year of the foundation of the Geological Society
of London) and 1850 (the year of Wordsworth's death).
FORTHCOMINGThere seems to be no end to finding new interpretations, sources and relevance for Mary Shelley's celebrated first novel; each edition brings to light something not known before. This one draws on the work of its predecessors of the last 25 years. It follows modern practice in printing the first 1818 edition, appending the author's preface and all substantive variants in the 1831 edition. It reproduces Mary Shelley's first attempt at revision (from the 'Thomas' copy) and, for the first time, collates the neglected second (1823) edition with 1818 and 1831. Often described as a page-by- page reprint of the 1818 edition, careful scrutiny shows the 1823 text to be a complete resetting of it. Thus it contains many small but significant alterations to the 1818 edition. Hitherto these alter- ations were thought to have been among those made by Mary Shelley in 1831, but evidence suggests that it was her father, William Godwin, who originated them.
This volume contains Mary Shelley's only completed novella,Matilda ; two mythological dramas, Proserpine and Midas; a selection of essays and reviews 1823-32; and the prefaces and notes to her editions of Shelley's poetry and prose. Matilda is a tale of incestuous love between father and daughter. It was composed in late 1819 and remained a manuscript throughout her lifetime. In this edition Matilda is newly transcribed from the manuscript, and the rough draft, entitled 'The Fields of Fancy' is printed in full. The verse dramas Proserpine and Midas, transcribed from the manuscript fair copies, present an adaptation of episodes from Ovid, probably designed for a young audience, and include lyrics by Shelley. Mary Shelley's prefaces and notes to her editions of Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839), and Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840) show her pioneering contribution to Shelley scholarship.
This, Mary Shelley's second full-length novel, originally called Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, bases its hero on an actual Italian tyrant of the early fourteenth century. The final title, how- ever, reflects the centrality of its theme of a female challenge to male ambition. An intelligent study in sexual politics, **Valperga** also contains some of Mary Shelley's most beautiful and impassioned writing. It was praised on publication for its convincing recreation of the period (Mary Shelley emulated Scott and foreshadowed George Eliot in the proficiency of her research and the portraits of its two female protagonists, though the heretic Beatrice shocked the Blackwood's reviewer). Yet, according to Mary Shelley, 'it never had fair play' and (except for a facsimile) has never been republished. This edition appends a transcript of seventeen pages of surviving manuscript, and the annotations make use of the editor's study of Mary Shelley's research notes.
The Last Man was Mary Shelley's third full-length novel and follows Frankenstein as one of the earliest examples of science fiction in English. It also presents characters who can be seen, in some of their aspects, to resemble certain members of the Shelley circle. The narrative begins in the late 21st century in an England which has become a republic, focusing at first on the conflicting worlds of the domestic and political. But as the plague takes hold and spreads relentlessly, the novel's view expands to encompass Europe and the world scene. Dark, even existential in its mood, The Last Man shows the demise of the human race, highlighted against its greatest achievement, as the ever-decreasing band of survivors make their way across the Alps to the warm cities of the South.
Mary Shelley's fourth novel, opens on 22nd August 1485, the day Richard III died in battle at Bosworth Field. Centered on the figure of the pretender who claimed to be the younger of the two princes smothered in the Tower at the order of their famous uncle, this historical romance follows the course of Warbeck's eventful career, as he struggles to assert his right to England's throne. By entertaining her 'belief that Perkin was, in reality, the lost Duke of York', Mary Shelley mounts a challenge to dramatists, chroniclers, and historians dismissive of her claims. In her hands, the story becomes an instrument not only for questioning the standard accounts of Warbeck's life but also for examining the issue that preoccupied her contemporaries as England entered the Age of Reform. This edition includes the corrections and marginal notations made by Mary Shelley in the 'Abinger' copy of the first edition.
Lodore sees Mary Shelley abandon Gothic fiction and historical romance in order to focus on human relationships, in recognizable contemporary settings. The novel takes its title from the Byronic hero, but much of the narrative and psychological interest derives from the development of his estranged wife and their daughter, the destruction of the family unit and the slow progress towards regeneration. The action moves from England to Wales, America and Continental Europe, in a series of locations that allow for contrast not only in physical description, but also in manners, political institutions, moral values and national characteristics. If Lodore's central theme is love in all its forms, the novel's structure enables Mary Shelley to introduce a wide variety of topical issues--from education to slavery to allusions and concerns. This is a work rooted in the Romantic period, but one which also anticipates the novels of the Victorian age.
Mary Shelley's final novel tells of the bond of fidelity between John Falkner, the passionate and self-divided hero, and his adopted daughter, who discovers his dissolute past but remains loyal. Mary Shelley's portrayal of Falkner's adventures in Europe is indebted to episodes in the lives of her friends, Lord Byron and Edward John Trelawney, but her investigation of extreme psychological states is modeled on the introspective fictions of her father, William Godwin.
This volume contains Mary Shelley's first ever published work, 'Mounseer Nongtongpaw' (1808), a satiric poem recounting an Englishman's uncomprehending visit to France; her much-read History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), written with Percy Bysshe Shelley; and based on their elopement to the Continent in 1814; and her recollections of travelling with her son and his friends in search of improved health, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). This edition of Rambles in Germany and Italy provides much of its historical information from the Handbooks for Travellers series begun by London publisher John Murray in the I83Os, allowing the reader to understand Mary Shelley's journeys and observations within the context of the travel conditions unique to the mid-nineteenth century. Previous editions of History of a Six Weeks' Tour have placed this work within the context of P. B. Shelley's life and correspondence, but this is the first edition to stress Mary Shelley's authorship and its relation to her creative development.
DESCRIPTION:
This hypertext-organized CD-ROM from Blackwell's will contain the full text of Duncan Wu's Romanticism: An Anthology as well as
abundant supplementary materials--including extra works by authors, canonical versions of works represented in the printed anthology in their earliest printed
form, a chronology of the period, a biographical dictionary, documents for the study of gothic fiction, political documents, and an image archive. For IBM PC's
running Windows. Blackwell's currently plans to release the CD-ROM first for site-license purchase by institutions, then later for lower-priced purchase by
individuals. For more detailed information about contents of the CD-ROM, consult the project's Web page:
Romanticism: CD-ROM
(includes downloadable sample files and images). Inquiries may be directed to David Miall or
Andrew MCNeillie of Blackwell's.
DESCRIPTION:
It is sometimes said that the literature of the Romantic period is gendered in its genres: the novel was dominated by women and poetry by
men. In fact, the age of Romanticism boasts a formidable array of women poets, who captured the literary market in the 1770s. Inspired by the bluestocking
salon of Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Montagu and by the Evangelical movement, poets such as Anna Barbauld and Hannah More, became respected and successful
writers. They, in turn often acted as patrons for aspiring working-class women poets like Anne Yearsley, "the poetical milkwoman of Bristol." A new
generation was inspired by this example, including Helen Maria Williams and Mary Robinson both fired with enthusiasm for the French revolution, the feminism of
Mary Wollstonecraft, and fashionable literary sentimentalism. A new generation was inspired by this example, including Helen Maria Williams and Mary Robinson.
[These last two sentences are verbatim from the publicity release--A.L.] Joanna Baillie, famed for her verse drama, was hailed as "the Shakespeare of her
age" in the 1790s. By the beginning of the nineteenth century a younger generation of popular poets, led by Felicia Hemans, earned sizeable incomes by
writing poetry extolling a domestic and patriotic ideology which became so beloved of the Victorians. This collection, including material never before
reprinted, offers an insight into the changing face of Romantic women's poetry. With these works only now coming under critical scrutiny, the volumes gathered
here represent an invaluable source for the modern reader.
Contents: [Note: I have not attempted to reformat or alter these contents, which are difficult to unscramble. --A.L.]
Louisa, a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles [1784] Anna Seward 101pp bound with The Lay of an Irish Harp; or Metrical Fragments [l807] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) 215pp Poems [1786] Helen Maria Williams (2 volumes bound in 1) 158pp, 202pp the Death of Amnon. With an Appendix containing pastorals and other poetical peices [1789] Elizabeth Hands 167pp bound with The Rural Lyre; a Volume of Poems. Dedicated to the Right Honourable the Earle of Bristol, Lord Bishop of Derry [1796] Ann Yearsley 154pp Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays [1797] Charlotte Smith (2 volumes bound in l) 118pp, 156pp A Series of Plays: in which It is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Each Passion being the subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy [1798] Joanna Baillie 414pp the Poetical Works [1806] Mary Robinson (3 volumes) 373pp, 387pp, 310pp Poems [1816] Hannah More 417pp The Works...with a Memoir (ed. Lucy Aikin) [1825] Anita Laetitia Barbauld (nee Aikin) 2 volumes 376pp, 476pp
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
One of the defining features of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterisation of the self in terms of
psychological depth. Many Romantic writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way, and in Romantic Identities Andrea K. Henderson
investigates that part of Romantic writing that challenges the 'depth' model, or operates outside its domain. Henderson explores forms of Romantic discourse,
explains their economic and social contexts, and examines their differing conceptions of identity. Individual chapters treat the Romantic view of the self in
embryo and at birth, the relation of gothic characterisation to the ghostliness of exchange value, anti-essentialism in Romantic physiology, the conception of
self as genre in writings by Percy and Mary Shelley, and the link between economic circulation and the distrust of psychological interiority in Scott.
JACKET DESCRIPTION:
During the later eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different
book from what it had been a hundred years earlier. While formal religion declined, the prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model rose to new
heights. Not merely was English, German, and even French Romanticism steeped in Biblical references of a new kind, but hermeneutics and, increasingly, theories
of literature and criticism were biblically derived. The Romantic Bible became simultaneously a single novel-like narrative work, an on-going tradition of
interpretation, and a 'metatype': an all-embracing literary form giving meaning to all other writing.