Bøger i Victorian Literature & Culture serien

This study uses 19th-century urban fiction - in particular the novels of Hugo and Dickens - to define a genre: the novel of urban mysteries. He argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities.

This volume studies Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men. The author examines classical novels by female authors in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement.

In this text, Schaffer analyzes writers such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Una Ashworth Taylor. These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them - the New Woman and the Angel in the House.

Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget in 1856 to English parents who lived on the Continent, bridged two worlds and many cultures. She was a Victorian by birth but lived into the second quarter of the twentieth century. Her chosen home was Italy, but she spent part of every year in England, where she published over the years an impressive number of books: novels, short stories, travel essays, studies of Italian art and music, psychological aesthetics, polemics. She was widely recognized as a woman of letters and moved freely in major literary and social circles, meeting and at times having close friendships with a huge number of the major writers and intellectuals of her time, among them Robert Browning, Walter Pater, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Berenson, and Mario Praz. Although she never committed herself to one program of political activism, she was an advocate for feminism and social reform and during World War I was an ardent pacifist. In her last years she watched with dismay the emergence of fascism.Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography recovers this crowded and intellectually eventful life from her previously unpublished letters and journals, as well as from her books themselves. Vineta Colby also explores Lee's troubled personal life, from her childhood in an eccentric expatriate family to her several unhappy love affairs with women to her frank recognition that her work, brilliant as some of it was, remained unappreciated. Through it all, Vernon Lee clung to her faith in the life of the mind, and through Colby's engaging biographical narrative, she emerges today as a writer worthy of renewed attention and admiration.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bible's poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolution-including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning-came to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text.Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation.This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the "e;truest and noblest woman's work"e; and praiseworthy for having raised the nation's moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause the defeminization of its practitioners as they became "e;public persons"e;? In Victorian England, women's participation in volunteer work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection between charitable and domestic work is the result of specific historical factors and cultural representations. Proponents of women as charitable workers encouraged philanthropy as being ideal work for a woman, while opponents feared the practice was destined to lead to overly ambitious and manly behavior.In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious. And although many scholars have dismissed women's volunteer endeavors as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works of women writers-among them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More and Anna Jameson-was crucial to the redefinition of gender roles and class relations.In a fascinating study of how literary works contribute to cultural and historical change, Elliott's exploration of philanthropic discourse in nineteenth-century literature demonstrates just how essential that forum was in changing accepted definitions of women and social relations.

As London became the first major city of the 19th century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistant worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it.

Focusing on the key 19th-century enterprise of collecting in museums, this work seeks to illuminate British culture of the period by examining the power that this collecting and exhibiting possessed. Through its museums, the author argues, Victorian London constructed itself as a world city.

Examines the place occupied both materially and discursively by the Crystal Palace and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century exhibitions in the struggle to understand what it means to be modern. This title also addresses the ways in which the cultural processes and tendencies brought together in these exhibitions have been refracted down.

What constitutes reading? This work seeks to transform the nineteenth-century field of ""Religion and Literature"" into ""Reading and Religion,"" emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts for each. It aims to make a contribution to various models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A definitive study of an author who in celebrating one era helped usher in the next. In this critical examination, the author sees Mary Arnold Ward as being ""behind her times"" in two senses - in her tireless defense of her evolving era's achievements and intentions, but also in her wariness of the advance of time and of the violence of change.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term, the materiality of writing, the author turns to the past in this provocative book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century.

Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style analyses the strengths and failures of her poetry, its attention to rhythm and the shifts of diction, its momentum and reserve, and the rationale for its revision. It also explores Rossetti's poetry for children, her reconfiguration of religion and poetry and the influences of female precursors she admired.

Christina Rossetti has come to be considered one of the major poets. ""The Letters of Christina Rossetti"" makes available all of her extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been published. These letters come from over 100 private and institutional collections. The fourth and final volume covers the last eight years of her life.

In recent cultural studies, poetry has become something of a neglected genre. Warwick Slinn seeks to reverse that trend and argues that a fundamental continuity between the meaning of a poetic trope and the social function of language can be established through speech act theory.

Concentrating on the use of illustration in Victorian literature - especially novels, poems and children's books - the essays collected in this text address a wide chronological and stylistic range of work. Topics include the century's best-known illustrators and the use of words as images.

Arguing that women's autobiography does not represent a singular separate tradition but instead embraces multiple lineages, this work explores the poetics and politics of these diverse forms of life writing.

In this final volume of the Virginia edition of Arnold's letters, he joins for the last time a Royal Commission on Education, travelling first to Germany, and then on to Switzerland and Paris. Following his wife and daughter, Arnold also makes his second American visit, to see his first grandchild.

The emotional and moral centre of this collection is the series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec.

Sensation novels - characterized by emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots - had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s. Exploring the metaphor of marital violence, the author examines the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law.

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of strict asceticism, and his commentators have often approved or disapproved of his rigorous self-discipline. This study uses Lacanian theories of sublimation and courtly love to reconfigure this rift in the field of Hopkins criticism.

The fourth of six volumes collecting the letters of Matthew Arnold. The letters chronicle Arnold's personal life in the characteristically intimate note of all his correspondence. He loses a son, a brother and his mother, and travels to France, Switzerland and Italy, recording his impressions.

The letters in this volume show the woman Rossetti was at this time in her life. By 1874 she was an established poet with a literary reputation among her contemporaries. But her personal life was overshadowed by the deaths and illness of close friends, and her own affliction with Graves' disease. In the VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE series.

Volume 2 of this six volume set covers the years 1860-65, when Arnold emerged as a critic and went on to consolidate his reputation. His letters record his impressions of Europe on an official school study, with observations of nature within and nature without.

Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. This volume begins in 1829 with an account of the Arnold children by their father, and closes in 1859, when already a poet and literary critic, Matthew Arnold returned to England after several months in Europe.

A collection of essays about the Victorian period, in which each essay seeks to draw connections with other disciplines, fields, periods, methodologies or authors.

First published in 1963 this new edition of Ruskin's writings aims to make his ideas and works accessible to the modern reader. This volume powerfully demonstrates the range and inexhaustible vitality of his prose and provided a reference tool for Victorianists.

This analysis probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's poetry. Focusing on the poet's early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - the author conflates desconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights.