By Amy Dunham Strand
September 30, 2024
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how white American women writers translated petitioning -- a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or what Strand calls “political prayer” -- in their literary works. At a time when petitioning was ...
By Andrew McInnes, Rita J. Dashwood
September 02, 2024
Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work which decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorizes the ridiculous as an alternative affect to the sublime, privileging collective laughter above solitude ...
By Henrik Johnsson
August 19, 2024
Henrik Ibsen’s plays were written at a critical juncture in late nineteenth-century European culture. Appearing at a time when notions of evolution and heredity were commonplace themes in literature and the arts, Ibsenian drama highlights the creative potential offered by contemporary evolutionary ...
By Anne Longmuir
August 15, 2024
John Ruskin and the Victorian Woman Writer addresses the little-considered personal and literary relationships of John Ruskin and four major Victorian women writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti. Drawing on new archival, primary research, the ...
By Jane Ford
August 01, 2024
Metaphors of Economic Exploitation in Literature, 1885–1914 explores the complex network of metaphors that emerged around late nineteenth-century conceptions of economic self-interest — metaphors that dramatised the predatory, conflictual and exploitative basis of relations between nations, ...
By Rebecca Nesvet
July 30, 2024
James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814-84) and an essential contribution to Victorian, Gothic, and working-class literary studies. It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny ...
By Brett Bourbon
May 27, 2024
Jane Austen and the Ethics of Description demonstrates that Elizabeth Bennet and her creator are misunderstood, and often unrecognized, geniuses of moral philosophy, but not simply because of their virtue or wit or natural skills in game theory. The engine driving the moral judgement and growth of ...
By Stephen Knight
May 27, 2024
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the complete works of Wilkie Collins’s. Examining his vast array of novels and short stories, this volume includes analysis of the social, historical, and political commentary Collins offered within his works, illuminating Collins as more than ...
By Stephen Knight
May 07, 2024
English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and ...
By Sarah Yoon
April 02, 2024
The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels studies how the detective as a literary character evolved through the mid-nineteenth century in England, as seen in sensation novels. In contrast to most assumptions about the English detective, Yoon argues that the detective was more often ...
Edited
By Brooke Cameron, Lara Karpenko
January 29, 2024
Against the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social...
By Michael J. Colacurcio
December 22, 2023
Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of “contextual historicism,” observing writers of the American nineteenth century, and their vastly differing approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and ...