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Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind
This work concentrates on how eighteenth-century feminine novelists articulate the concerns important to women's lives and fates, and argues that these novelists used their romances to combat the controlling ideologies of the age.
Love, Mystery and Misery
The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. Dr. Howells proposes a radical reassessment of these novels to emphasize their importance as experiments in imaginative writing. Her object, the study of feeling, is central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodies contemporary neuroses, especially sexual fears and repressions, which run right through it and are basic to its conventions. This study traces the effort to articulate these disconcerting emotions in symbol, incident, landscape and architecture. The chronological design suggests developments in Gothic, from the initial explorations of Mrs Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, through the Minerva Press novelists and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", to new directions taken by C.R. Maturin in "Melmoth the Wanderer" and later by Charlotte Bronte whose "Jane Eyre", arguably the finest of Gothic novels, places the earlier experiments in perspective.
The Central Self
In this closely argued book Dr Ball is concerned to analyse the imaginative process of self-understanding which emerged as a characteristic feature of English Romantic poetry and, acquiring fresh creative force in the Victorian period, has been transmitted to our own times as a determining principle of the contemporary imagination. Dr Ball relates her discussion to the distinction between the poet speaking directly in his own voice and the impulse to dramatised utterance – the two modes of poetic expression conveniently summed up in Keats's contrasting terms 'egotistical sublime' and 'chameleon'. She shows how these 'polar' tendencies co-exist fruitfully in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridg...
The Science of Aspects
'There is a science of the aspects of things, as well as of their nature' – if this dictum of Ruskin is central to his aims in Modern Painters it points also to the remarkable affinity of creative effort to record and to interpret the natural world that links him with Coleridge at the beginning and with Hopkins in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the three writers stand in no simple relation of mere sequence and in this essay, which continues the exploration of the Romantic and Victorian imagination begun in her previous book, The Central Self, Dr Ball follows the complex interrelationships, clash and resolution of ideas by which a profound shift in nineteenth-century creative vision was effected. The notebooks and diaries of the three writers together with the literary work that grew out of or paralleled this material form the foundation for this illuminating essay, but Dr Ball's enquiry is necessarily wide-ranging and branches into such wider questions as the whole critical theory of the pathetic fallacy and the influence on Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins of contemporary science and the visual arts.
The Book Beautiful
The letters collected here comprise an important chapter in the life of Walter Pater's literary career. They record in great detail the relations between this Victorian man of letters and his publisher, Macmillan and Co. Specifically they illustrate how such discussions affected the form as well as the content of his books. The book provides a very full illustration and analysis of the crucial influence of the author-publisher relationship to literature.
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women
"This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Heart's Events
Dr Ball offers an analysis and evaluation of a number of Victorian long poems and groups of lyrics which trace the course of close personal relationships. Her argument is that whereas Romantic treatment of such material was limited, the Victorian poets not only made this emotional territory their own but explored it with vigour, variety and enterprise, and great technical resource. This is apparent, as Dr Ball shows, whether the poets concern themselves with crises such as loss through death – In Memoriam, Patmore's odes of bereavement – or breakdown – Modern Love, Maud, James Lee's Wife – or whether they portray the intricate flux of mutual attraction and courtship, as in Amours de Voyage, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and The Angel in the House. The Heart's Events brings out strongly the experimental vitality and range of Victorian poetry and, in particular, its sensitive imaginative response to the subtleties of psychological time and change in its records of the inner histories of love.
Jane Austen and her Works
In one volume Sarah Tytler presents the most characteristic of Jane Austen's novels, together with her life. The tales and the life are calculated to reflect on each other, and the arrangement of the tales – selected by the author as Austen wrote them, not as they happened to be published – allows the growth of Austen's mind and taste to be recognised. The author touches on these great English novels in such a way as to make them readily accessible to all. She points out the great changes in social standards, customs and fashions that have occurred since Jane Austen wrote, but concludes that the human nature in her books remains the same as human nature in every generation.
The Active Universe
This book is a study of 'Romantic Pantheism' and its part in the development of the Romantic theory of the Imagination. The crucial point in the history of English Romanticism came when the philosophical concept of the 'active universe' met the developing theory of the Imagination. In its leading sense, Imagination meant full response to, and implication with, the living qualities of natural objects. That is why it was able to assimilate and transform contemporary theories of merely passing interest into an important poetic approach to the universe.
Jane Austen
A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her de...
