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Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830
Definitions of the Romantic period have undergone considerable change in the last few years. Beyond the careers of the 'Big Six' (Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats), critics have begun to recognise a much fuller range of writers flourishing in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Who were these other writers whose popularity threatened the fame of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron? What happens to our understanding of canonical authors when we place them in the context of the print culture of their own time? This book is an accessible and stimulating account of the recent vital changes in critical perceptions of Romanticism. It will enable students and teachers to navigate the new diversities and complexities of Romantic studies, providing a fresh, readable reassessment of a controversial and exciting period.
Byron and Romanticism
This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.
Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson
Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of Emily Dickinson, one of the most famous and widely studied American poets of the 19th century. Known for her wit and preference for seclusion from the outside world, Dickinson rarely left her home in Amherst, Mass., preferring instead to write quietly from the confines of her bedroom. This new title contains close readings and critical analyses of more than 150 of Dickinson's best-known poems, including ""Because I could not stop for Death,"" ""I felt a funeral, in my Brain,"" ""I died for Beauty - but was scarce,"" and ""I like to see it lap the miles."" The different aspects of Dickinson's life that influenced her work are also discussed, including family, friends, teachers, townspeople, editors, and correspondents. In this single-volume reference, admirers, general readers, and lovers of poetry will discover hundreds of entries covering every aspect of Dickinson's life and work. Its coverage Includes: a biography of Dickinson; entries on her most famous and most anthologized poems; the essential people in her life; spiritual and literary influences; social and religious movements; her publishing history; critical approaches to her work; important themes and metaphors; and, a foreword by noted poet Gregory Orr.
Critical Insights: The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Though many associate Edgar Allan Poe with his poems and his tales, his influence in the realm of formal literary aesthetics is vast and difficult to measure. In his brief but brilliant career as a writer and magazine editor, he wrote numerous reviews and prefaces that, taken together, formulate a complex but coherent conception of artistic practice and purpose, one that served to illuminate the Romanticism of his era and provide an impetus for a worldwide reconsideration of literary art and its nature. This was especially notable in the “aesthetic movement” in France under Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine, and in Britain under Oscar Wilde. It was also observable in the French Symbolist poets, including Paul Valéry, as well as in the rise of New Critical Formalism in the early twentieth century.
Goethe's Allegories of Identity
A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself. Goethe's Allegories of Identity examines how Goethe created the essential bridge between the psychological insights of his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the psychoanalytic theories of his admirer Sigmund Freud. Equally fascinated and repelled by Rousseau's vision of an unconscious self, Goethe struggled with the moral question of subjectivity: what is the relation of conscience to consciousness? To explore this inner conflict through language, Goethe developed a unique mode of allegorical representation that modernized the long tradition of dramatic personification in European drama. Jane K. Brown's deft, focused readings of Goethe's major dramas and novels, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to Elective Affinities, reveal each text's engagement with the concept of a subconscious or unconscious psyche whose workings are largely inaccessible to the rational mind. As Brown demonstrates, Goethe's representational strategies fashioned a language of subjectivity that deeply influenced the conceptions of important twentieth-century thinkers such as Freud, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt.
Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative
One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This original book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a new look at his most famous works of fiction.
Literature of the Romantic Period
This book provides a selective, critical guide to the best and the typical in scholarship and criticism directed towards literature of the Romantic period, circa 1780-1830. It includes chapters on the most studied poets of the period: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, andClare. It also contains separate chapters on the fiction (and other writings) of Scott, and the novels of Austen, Mary Shelley, and Peacock. Reflecting recent changes in understanding of the period, there are also chapters on women poets, political prose, essayists, and a range of male poetsincluding Burns, Cowper, and Crabbe. A separate chapter is devoted to women novelists of the period. An introduction surveys general studies of the period and evaluates contributions to debate about the nature of the Romantic. All chapters include a list of references at their ends. Throughout,the impact of literary theory and recent editorial work is taken into account. The book will prove an invaluable resource to students, academics, teachers, and general readers.
Madness, Love and Tragedy in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Spain
How do Spanish writers of the 19th and 20th century define and represent madness, a basic and controversial aspect of world culture, and how do the different conceptions of madness intersect with love, religion, politics, and other literary themes in Spanish society? This multi-author book analyzes the theme of madness in formative masterpieces of Spanish literature of the 19th and 20th century through the use of relevant critical and theoretical approaches. In this context, authors studied in this book include Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas Clarín, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Caterina Albert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Miguel de Unamuno, and Juan Goytisolo, among others.
The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature exemplifies new trends in "Third Wave" feminist scholarship, presenting cultural and historical research informed by clear, lucid discussions of psychoanalytic and literary theory. It demonstrates that contemporary theories of masochism--including those of Deleuze, Bataille, Kristeva, Benjamin, Bersani, Noyes, Mansfield--are more relevant and comprehensible when considered in relation to sentimental literature.
Russia's Golden Age
Critical Insights: Russia's Golden Age This volume of criticism presents a variety of new essays on 19th century Russian literature, traditionally referred to as the Golden Age of Russian literature. Works include Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace and Anna Karenina, Ivan Turgenev's Fathers & Sons, and Fyodor Dostorevsky's Crime and Punishment. Several essays survey the critical conversation regarding this genre, explore its cultural and historical contexts and offer close and comparative reading of key texts in the genre.
War and Peace
This volume examines Tolstoy's unique achievement through a number of thought-provoking essays, and the interplay of the many genres of the text, including historical fiction, war drama, romance and realism.