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This book argues for the significance of contagious disease in critical and biographical assessment of Charlotte Brontë's work. Waugh argues that contagion, infection, and quarantining strategies are central themes in Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853). This book establishes the ways in which Charlotte Brontë was closely engaged with the political and social contexts in which she wrote, extending this to the representation and metaphorical import of illness in Brontë's novels. Waugh also posits that although miasmatic theories are often assumed to have been entirely in the ascendant in the late 1840s, the relationship between miasma and contagion was a complex one and contagion in fact remained a crucial way for Charlotte Brontë to represent disease itself, as well as to explore the relationships between the individual and social, political, and cultural contexts. Contagion and its metaphors are central to Charlotte Brontë's construction of subjectivity and of the responsibilities of the individual and the group.

This book develops a theory of aesthetic fiction's impact on social identities. Throughout five case studies, the author develops the argument that social identities are nurtured by and may even emerge through the conflict between different aesthetic expressions. As it creates affective structures, narrative fiction enables the development and formation of political and cultural identities. This work is part of a field of research that deals with the aesthetics of the everyday and the idea of social aesthetics. It argues for a central role for the arts in the creation and formation of modern society. Social identities emerge in response to aesthetic-sensual patterns of perception.Focusing on five West German public debates in the years 1950 to 1990, this work sheds light upon the transformation of social reality through the discursive adaption of art.

The last two decades have witnessed a profound change in the way we receive the literary texts of early modern England. One could call this a move from'text'to'culture'. Put briefly, earlier critics tended to focus on literary texts, strictly conceived: plays, poems, prose fictions, essays. Since the mid-1980s, however, it has been just as likely for critics to speak of the'culture'of early modern England, even when they do so in conjunction with analysis of literary texts. This'cultural turn'has clearly enriched the way in which we read the texts of early modern England, but the interdisciplinary practices involved have frequently led critics to make claims about materials - and about the'culture'these materials appear to embody - that exceed those materials'representativeness. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture addresses the central issue of'culture'in early modern studies through both literary history and disciplinary critique. Douglas Bruster argues that the'culture'literary critiques investigate through the works of Shakespeare and other writers is largely a literary culture, and he examines what this necessary limitation of the scope of'cultural studies'means for the discipline of early modern studies.

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four'radical eccentrics'- the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics'vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.

This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres, including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and China Miéville's Bas-Lag, among others, this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.

The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power interprets a wide variety of the most interesting Irish novels of the last ten years of the century from a perspective that focuses on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. The demarcating line of identity-the perennial Irish problem-can be gauged at the basic level of sexual and gender identity in contrast to or in alliance with political, social, religious or cultural norms. All mechanisms that have gone into controlling the body-gender regulation, violence, desire, religious taboos-can all be reinterpreted through the body in motion.

This stimulating and comprehensive study of Will Self's work spans his entire career and offers insightful readings of all his fictional and non-fictional work up to and including his Booker prize nominated novel Umbrella.

Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.

This collection explores how new directions in feminist literary study might be informed by the work of the past. It offers a snapshot view of new feminist research in the field today and traces the influence of the substantial feminist inheritance in English Studies through six distinct, individual pieces of rigorous and innovative new work.

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.

This multidisciplinary study focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the work of numerous poets, artists, and philosophers from twentieth-century Spain. Beginning with cognitive science, Gala explores the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking, for poets like José María Hinojosa, Clara Janés, and Jorge Guillén.

Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing offers a new critical approach to E. M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers.

This book explores the way older women are represented in society. Through close readings of novels by major 20th century novelists, compared with the more dominant representations of female ageing to be found in popular culture it suggests that they offer a feminist understanding of the'invisible'woman sometimes lacking in feminism itself.

This Palgrave Pivot volume explores an exciting range of powerful novels and memoirs from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria that reveal political geographies of injustice and popular discontent thus'anticipating'or imaginatively envisioning as well as participating in some of the major current upheavals in their particular national contexts.

Despite dying in relative obscurity, Jane Austen has become a global force as different readers across time, space and media have responded to her work. This volume examines the ways in which her novels affect individual psychologies and how Janeites experience her work, from visiting her home to public re-enactments to films based on her writings.

This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture.

Examining the work of three authors: Richardson, Haywood and Burney, and their representation of domestic space, this book argues that to make such spaces accessible to modern readers they need to have information of the real domestic. By recreating specifics of these spaces this book innervates the fictional domestic interior for modern readers.

This lively study provides an account of the'fall and rise'of the English nation within the British discipline of English Literature between the late eighteenth century and the present day, offering a reconceptualisation of the relationship between English Literature and the formation of English cultural identity.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

What role do objects play in realist narratives as they move between societies and their different systems of value as commodities, as charms, as gifts, as trophies, or as curses? This book explores how the struggle to represent objects in British colonial realism corresponded with historical struggles over the material world and its significance.

Blake said of his works,'Tho'I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. So who owns Blake? Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume takes Blake 2.0 as an interactive concept, examining digital dissemination of his works and reinvention by artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers across a variety of twentieth-century media.

It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.

Through interviews with leading writers (including Ahdaf Soueif and Hanif Kureishi), this book analyzes the writing and opinions of novelists of Muslim heritage based in the UK. Discussion centres on writers'work, literary techniques, and influences, and on their views of such issues as the hijab, the war on terror and the Rushdie Affair.

This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the'spectral'influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analyzing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the séance.

Acheraiou challenges postcolonial discourse analysis and proposes a new model of interpretation that resituates the historical, ideological and conceptual denseness of the Colonial idea. He questions key issues, including hybridity, Otherness and territoriality, and expands the postcolonial field by introducing ground-breaking theoretical concepts.

Re-Thinking Europe sets out to investigate the place of the idea of Europe in literature and comparative literary studies. The essays in this collection turn to the past, in which Europe became synonymous with a tradition of peace and tolerance beyond national borders, and enter into a critical dialogue with the present, in which Europe has increasingly become associated with a history of oppression and violence. The different essays together demonstrate how the idea of Europe cannot be thought apart from the tension between the regional and the global, between nationalism and pluralism, and can therefore be re-thought as an opportunity for an identity beyond national or ethnic borders. Engaging contemporary discourses on hybrid, postcolonial, and transnational identity, this volume shows how literature can function as both a vital tool to forge new identities and a power subversive of such attempts at identity-formation. Like Europe, it is always marked by the tension between integration and resistance. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern literature, comparative literature, and European studies, as well as people concerned with cultural memory and the relation between literature and cultural identity.

This book brings a new dimension to the critical debate about the complex relationship of Woolf to the marketplace and commodity culture through a focus on the gift economy at work in Woolf's writing, exploring the political subversiveness of the gift and its significance in her modernist aesthetics.

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land.

This book argues that Gothic writing of the Romantic period is queer. Using a variety of texts, it argues that contemporary queer theory can help us to read the obliqueness and invisibility of same-sex desire in a culture of vigilance. Fincher shows how the Gothic's ambivalent gender politics destabilize heteronormative narratives.

Schmid shows how reception processes work across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, taking the English Romantic poet Shelley's German reception as a case study. It also highlights Anglo-German literary and cultural relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and supplies a theoretical framework for further analysis.

Through analysis of eight English novels of the Nineteenth century, this work explores the ways in which the novel contributes to the formation of ideology regarding the family, and, conversely, the ways in which changing attitudes toward the family shape and reshape the novel.

This is the first study to fully trace the influence of Sensibility on British Romanticism. Sensibility continually found new forms of expression in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. Nagle explores how it coexisted and intermingled with Romanticism and revises the traditional narratives of literary periodization of this era.

By the middle of the nineteenth century much clearly gendered, anti-Catholic literature was produced for the Protestant middle classes. Nineteenth Century Anti-Catholic Discourses explores how this writing generated a series of popular Catholic images and looks towards the cultural, social and historical foundation of these representations. Diana Peschier places the novels of Charlotte Brontë within the framework of Victorian social ideologies, in particular the climate created by rise of anti-Catholicism and thus provides an alternative reading of her work.

Following on from Julian Wolfrey's successful Writing London (1998), this second volume extends Wolfrey's original argument that a new urban sensibility in the nineteenth century had been developed which established new ways of writing about and responding to the city. Writing London - Volume 2 explores through a range of readings of twentieth-century films and texts the complex relationship between the experience of the city, the pleasures of the urban text and the solitary nature of these pleasures. The book has a broad focus, in part dictated not only by the transformation of literary production in the twentieth-century, but also by the need to respond to the changes in both urban representation and London itself. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duffy, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. The volume covers texts from the late nineteenth-century to the end of the twentieth, in a critical reading that incorporates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida.

This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers'descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.

This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists (Darwin, Stevenson, Gaskell, Ruskin, Pater, Brown and Turner) whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. The study concentrates on the longing for a past that traverses the span of these writers'and artists'own lifetime. It examines their particular experience of the nostalgic moment and provides an occasion to re-examine the idea of nostalgia and to reflect on the act of recollection.

During the last decades of the twentieth century it has become increasingly difficult to consider British literature as'national'or'mainstream'. The book investigates contemporary fiction and poetry written in, or relating to, Britain and uncovers a distinct sense of a new and different national and social reality. Tracing literary effects of migration, globalization, and regionalization the book focuses on literary tradition as an inspiration or object of hate and frustration for the exploration and expression of post-Imperial experiences.

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergency of corporate social forms.

Emerson's Sublime Science explores relationships among Emerson's poetics, theory of the sublime, and engagement with electromagnetism. The book illustrates how Davy's chemistry and Faraday's physics revealed to Emerson a sublime universe in which matter is boundless electrical force. It argues that Emerson translated this discovery into a sublime writing style crafted to galvanize readers with the insight that matter is energy. In illuminating Emerson's project, this study also uncovers connections among British Romanticism, American Romanticism, and nineteenth-century science.

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism is the first full-length study to examine how Jefferson, in the process of inventing the USA as the first new nation of the Romantic era, sought to find an appropriate imagery to represent the people, their homeland and the cultural ideal to which they should aspire. It examines in detail the role of his villa at Monticello in embodying the national ideal, shows how those ideals emerged and how they were subsequently challenged by the reinterpretation of Jefferson's iconography.