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This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this 'Leap in the Dark', authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urban and more anonymous. While some fantasized about ways of capturing and holding the attention of the masses, others preferred to make art and literature more exclusive, to shut out the crowd. One path led to 'Sensation'; the other to aestheticism, though there were also efforts to evade this opposition. This book examines the fiction, drama, fine art, and ephemeral forms of these years against the backdrop of Reform. Authors and artists studied include Wilkie Collins, Dion Boucicault, Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, and the popular illustrator, Alfred Concanen. ... Read more

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In this text, writers and teachers such as Grace Paley, Edmund White and Andrei Codrescu explore their responses to literature. They describe how they teach and what they teach, and remember the teaching they received, both good and bad. ... Read more

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Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres.Poetry has been described as 'a necessary art' that enriches what goes on inside us. This book offers an introduction to the often challenging world of contemporary poetry. The book focuses on very recent poetry, and examines the various challenges to tradition it presents: challenges of both content and form, as well as more practical challenges such as new forms of publication. The poetry is considered in relation to social, cultural and political contexts throughout. Contents include recent work by established poets such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes as well as poetry by writers who have emerged since 1990 such as Jackie Kay and Vicki Feaver. ... Read more

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The Comedies with Introductions by Judith BuchananThese Comedies are among the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. In each a problem emerges, is then intensified to a point of maximum confusion and potential upset, before the chaos is resolved, however improbably, into general goodwill and a spate of marriages. The triumph of these plays lies in the way they mingle humorous stage business and dexterous word play with a more serious study of identity, gender, dreaming, the meaning of love, even of the theatre itself. They reassure us that with all its faults, the world will always in the end be redeemable.The Tragedies with Introductions by Emma Smith'Not for an age but for all time.' So Ben Jonson established what we now take for granted: Shakespeare's unique place among the world's great authors. Romeo and Juliet shows us the archetypal story of fated young love; Hamlet, the tortured psyche of the young prince of Denmark; Othello, a strikingly modern representation of racial difference; King Lear, a man stripped of all material and psychological comforts; and Macbeth, a dark investigation of the origins and effects of, evil. The plays throw a fascinating light on the concerns of Shakespeare's day, yet offer perennial insights into the nature of human emotion. ... Read more

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Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century. ... Read more

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'Michael Field' (1884-1914) was the pseudonym of two women, the aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together as 'lovers'. The large oeuvre contains poems, dramas, and a vast diary. Marion Thain recounts the development of a fascinating and idiosyncratic poetic persona, which became a self-reflexive study in aestheticism. The constructed life and work of 'Michael Field' is used here to deepen and complicate our understanding of many of the most distinctive aesthetic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a process unified by the recurring engagement with theories of time and history that structures this book. This analysis of poetry, aestheticism and the fin de siècle, through the performance of 'Michael Field', has implications that reach far beyond an understanding of one poet's work. Scholars of both Victorian and modernist literature will learn much from this innovative and compelling study. ... Read more

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This volume of essays examines the perceived rift between the British and German intellectual and cultural traditions before 1914 and how the resultant war of words both reflects and helped determine historical, political, and, ultimately, military events. This vexed symbiosis is traced first through a survey of popular fiction, from alarmist British and German "invasion novels" to the visions of Erskine Childers and Saki and even P.G. Wodehouse; contrastingly, the "mixed-marriage novels" of von Arnim, Spottiswoode, and Wylie are considered. Further topics include D. H. Lawrence's ambivalent relationship with Germany, Carl Sternheim's coded anti-militarism, H. G. Wells's and Kurd Lasswitz's visions of their countries under Martian invasion, Nietzsche as the embodiment of Prussian warmongering, and the rise in Germany of anglophobic, anti-Spencerian evolutionism. Case histories of the positions of German and English academics in regard to the conflict round out the volume. CONTRIBUTORS: IAIN BOYD WHITE, HELENA RAGG-KIRKBY, RHYS WILLIAMS, INGO CORNILS, NICHOLAS MARTIN, GREGORY MOORE, STEFAN MANZ, ANDREAS HUTHER, HOLGER KLEINFred Bridgham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at the University of Leeds. ... Read more

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Visions and Visionaries is an apt title for this volume of essays on contemporary Austrian literature and film, because this collection offers insightful discussions of a gal-lery of significant authors and cultural figures. It also investigates important issues of style and genre, and portrays questions of Austrian identity and culture in rich contexts of recent literary and multi-media developments, cross-cultural interactions, and historical forces. This book encompasses relevant trends and notions from the past—especially the com-plexities of lingering effects of the Nazi era—along with issues of the future—in particular the present and anticipated interactions of culture and cyberspace. The essays are en-hanced by poems by Evelyn Schlag and Gerhard Kofler. ... Read more

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" At the rise of the Tudor age, England began to form a national identity. With that sense of self came the beginnings of the colonialist notion of the ""other."" Ireland, however, proved a most difficult other because it was so closely linked, both culturally and geographically, to England. Ireland's colonial position was especially complex because of the political, religious, and ethnic heritage it shared with England. Andrew Murphy asserts that the Irish were seen not as absolute but as ""proximate"" others. As a result, English writing about Ireland was a problematic process, since standard colonial stereotypes never quite fit the Irish. But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us examines the English view of the ""imperfect"" other by looking at Ireland through works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Murphy also considers a broad range of materials from the Renaissance period, including journals, pamphlets, histories, and state papers.

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The presence of the Past studies the interaction of heritage and fiction written for children over a 40 year period in Britain, exploring a range of works for children fromThe Tale of Peter RabbittoI Spy. ... Read more