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This original study of Elizabeth Gaskell places the woman and her writings within their full Victorian context. Recent critical appraisal has focused both on her role as a novelist of industrial England, and on her awareness of the position of women and the problems of the woman writer in that society. Kate Flint's perceptive book shows that for Elizabeth Gaskell the condition of women was inseparable from the broader issues of social change. Books such as Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters continually analyse and interrogate questions of power, authority and the expression and transmission of human values, and challenge many widely-held pre-conceptions of the age. Dr Flint shows how recent feminist criticism and theories of narrative work together to illuminate the radical and experimental nature of Mrs Gaskell's fiction.

Flash! presents a fascinating cultural history of flash photography, from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. All photography requires light, but the light of flash photography is quite distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright. Associated with revelation and wonder, it has been linked to the sublimity of lightning. Yet it has also been reviled: it's inseparable from anxieties about intrusion and violence, it creates a visual disturbance, and its effects are often harsh and create exaggerated contrasts. Flash! explores flash's power to reveal shocking social conditions, its impact on the representation of race, its illumination of what would otherwise remain hidden in darkness, and its capacity to put on display the most mundane corners of everyday life. It looks at flash's distinct aesthetics, examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up - and interrupt - countless family gatherings, how flash can'stop time'allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb. Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash's place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.

First published in 1984. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent not only era of rapidly changing artistic methods but a crucial evolution in art criticism. This book gathers together a wide-range of the criticism that greeted the work of the Impressionists artists in the English Press. The selected examples of praise and antagonism reflect the sentiments expressed in the comments of prominent newspaper and periodical critics. The selection shows the importance of Impressionist art to English art criticism and wide comprehension of the formal qualities in painting. It also demonstrates how forward-looking critics created new criteria for the discussion of modern painting.

First published in 1987. Many Victorian novels that considered social problems made extensive use of contemporary source material for their descriptions. This book aims to provide a greater acquaintance with this non-literary material — illustrating and exemplifying issues that the authors treated imaginatively. The material is divided into parts dealing with: the industrial north of England, London and the agricultural poor. Extracts from writings that bear directly on the fiction of writers like Dickens and Gaskell are featured, as are Government Blue Books and newspaper reports and articles. This volume also contains articles by Dickens and others, from his magazine, Household Words.

This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. Kate Flint shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and she reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world.Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, Flint traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. She describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. Flint explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America.The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional ways of representing character and experience. The novel's composition coincided with the consolidation of Woolf's interest in feminism, and she criticizes the privileged thoughtless smugness of patriarchy, `the other side', `the men in clubs and Cabinets'. Her stylistic innovations are conscious attempts to realize and develop women's writing and the novel dramatizes her interest in the ways both language and social environments shape differently the lives of men and women. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a `Somebody'- why my diary should not be interesting.'The Diary of a Nobody (1892) created a cultural icon, an English archetype. Anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish, Charles Pooter has come to be seen as the epitome of English suburban life. His diary chronicles encounters with difficult tradesmen, the delights of home improvements, small parties, minor embarrassments, and problems with his troublesome son. The suburban world he inhabits is hilariously and painfully familiar in its small-mindedness and its essential decency. Both celebration and critique, The Diary of a Nobody has often been imitated, but never bettered. This edition features Weedon Grossmith's hilarious illustrations and is complemented by an enjoyable introduction discussing the book's social background and suburban fiction as a genre. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity This is the insight that flashes upon Ursula as she struggles to assert her individuality and to stand separate from her family and her surroundings on the brink of womanhood and the modern world. In The Rainbow (1915) Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structure of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. Condemned and suppressed on its first publication for its open treatment of sexuality and its `unpatriotic'spirit, the novel chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. The central figure of ursula becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail. In her introduction to this edition Kate Flint illuminates Lawrence's aims and achievements against the background of the burgeoning century. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.