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‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ MARK HADDON 'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD 'A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A. S. BYATT Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew.
Anne DeWitt examines how Victorian novelists challenged the claims of men of science to align scientific practice with moral excellence.
This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.
This book contains essays by important scholars on the historical significance of the Metaphysical Society (1869-1880). The contributors examine the innermost thoughts of the leading intellectuals of the period as they grappled with the changes around them.
The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.
Fictions of Autonomy presents a revisionary account of aesthetic autonomy and transnational modernism with a range of readings that includes works by Wilde, Eliot, Joyce, Barnes, and Stevens alongside writings by theorists like Adorno and de Man.
Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature’s materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book’s chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (“form,” “experiment,...
Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue-The Forgotten Story of Ecce Homo -- Chapter One-Authority and Authorship -- Chapter Two-By the Author of Essays on the Church -- Chapter Three-Father and Son -- Chapter Four-The Victorian Jesus -- Chapter Five-A Dangerous Book -- Chapter Six-Vomited from the Jaws of Hell -- Chapter Seven-A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing -- Chapter Eight-Shrewd Conjecture -- Chapter Nine-White Lies -- Chapter Ten-Behold the Man -- Chapter Eleven-Behold the Historian -- Chapter Twelve-Fulfilling a Promise -- Chapter Thirteen-By the Author of Ecce Homo -- Chapter Fourteen-Remembering the Author of Ecce Homo -- Epilogue-Anonymous Publishing and Universal History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Studies in Book and Print Culture
Written with and for citizens who feel overwhelmed by political and economic forces outside of their control, Ordinary Democracy makes a compelling argument for the adequacy of democratic politics to address the challenges associated with neoliberalism and the growth of emergency politics. It rejects cynicism about democratic citizenship by focusing on the practices of ongoing movements, bridging the social detachment that has separated academic investigations of democracy and activists in the past in order to add another layer to the public philosophy produced within these movements.
A collection of top-selected mystery writing from the past year is culled from a variety of respected sources and offers insight into evolving genre trends.