Bøker i Victorian Literature and Culture Series-serien

Joseph Conrad's major novels tell of illusions and betrayals, dreams and lies. Ambiguity, contradiction, and irony so dominate the narratives that the more closely one reads, the more difficult it becomes to know what is real or what is true. This perplexity, which is the binding force of Conrad's art, is thoroughly examined in Culture and Irony.

This is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England's greatest work of narrative fiction.

In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams examines the liberal imagination's centuries-long dependence on contradictory, and mutually constitutive, attitudes toward violent domination. Adams centers his ambitious analysis on a series of major epic poems, histories, and historical novels, including Dryden's Aeneid, Pope's Iliad, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Byron's Don Juan, Scott's Life of Napoleon, Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula, Macaulay's History of England, Hardy's Dynasts, and Churchill's military histories-works that rank among the most important publishing events of the past three centuries yet that have seldom received critical attention relative to their importance. In recovering these neglected works and gathering them together as part of a self-conscious literary tradition here defined as liberal epic, Adams provides an archaeology that sheds light on contemporary issues such as the relation of liberalism to war, the tactics for sanitizing heroism, and the appeal of violence to supposedly humane readers. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

In Victorian Connections, each contributor was asked to write about anything in the Victorian period, with only one proviso: that the essay seek to draw connections with other disciplines, fields, periods, methodologies or authors. The compliment the essays pay to each other - the way they complement each other - lies in their diversity.

As London became the first major city of the nineteenth 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 persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it.

Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of Tennyson's poetry to date. He proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading of Tennyson. In a series of original, scrupulously attentive, and sophisticated close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work.

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 a unique fusion of literary history and printing history, Allan C. Dooley explores the interactions between individual authors and their publishers and printers. He takes the reader through each stage of a work's development, illustrating how authors attempted to perfect and protect their writings from compositional manuscript through stereotyped reprints.

In this unconventional biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there lived in "Mrs Gaskell" another, antithetical self, a daemonic double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature born to be a "gypsy-bachelor".

Emily Shore's journal is the unique self-representation of a prodigious young Victorian woman. From July 5, 1831 until June 24, 1839, two weeks before her death, she recorded her reactions to the world around her. She wrote of political issues, natural history, her progress as a scholar and scientist, and the worlds of art and literature.

Beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore, Fischler demonstrates how W.S. Gilbert made it his business to cater to the sensibilities of the middle class through the structure he imposed on his plots, the approach he took to characterization, and the treatment he accorded erotic love, the quintessential theme of comedy.

Offers a new approach to the study of instalment literature by showing how it embodied a view of life intrinsic to Victorian culture, and suggesting that for the Victorians the publishing format became an essential factor in creating meaning.

"Albright contends that Tennyson's "aesthetic goals were... in conflict" and that his poetry attempts to "unite two incompatible poetics',' one governed by a heavenly muse, the other by an earthly muse suspicious of the idealizations and abstractions held dear by the first. The result is a poetry of "myopia and astigmatism".

Traces the phenomenon of ascribing sentimental meaning to floral imagery from its beginnings in Napoleonic France through its later transformations in England and America. At the heart of the book is a depiction of what the three most important flower books from each of the countries divulge about the period and the respective cultures.

Drawing from a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship, this timely work explores Austen's ironic use of art and artifact to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen's thought.

Traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society.

In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig aesthetic tradition.

In the nineteenth century, a woman who could prove a man had broken his promise to marry her was legally entitled to compensation for damages. Bridging the gap between history and literature, Ginger Frost offers an in-depth examination of these breaches of promise and compares actual with fictional cases.

Portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfil and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace.

A reproduction of the original 1873 edition of "The Romance of the Harem" by Anna Leonowens which was the source for the 20th-century book "Anna and the King of Siam", known to many through Rogers and Hammerstein's "The King and I".