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Approximately three fifths of the emigration from the United Kingdom to America arrived in the 19th century. The remainder came through Ellis Island between 1900 and 1924. Arrivals from the U.K. began to increase in the mid-1840's with the Irish Famine that led to very high mortality rates, rising prices and unemployment and a massive outflow of Irish population to the U.S. In the post-Famine period, England's industrial revolution progressed and emigration continued to grow between the prosperous 1850's and the mid-1890's. This series on Emigration from the United Kingdom to America concentrates on U.K. emigration in the period 1870-1897, listing migrants from the U.K. who arrived in New Yo...
Mantic elements are manifold in the English drama of the Renaissance period: they are supernatural manifestations and have a prophetic, future-determining function within the dramatic plot, which can be difficult to discern. Addressing contemporaries of Shakespeare, this study interprets a representative number of revenge tragedies, among them The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Revenger's Tragedy, to draw general conclusions about the use of mantic elements in this genre. The analysis of the cultural context and the functionalisation of mantic elements in revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline era show their essential function in the construction of the plot. Mantic elements create and stimulate audience expectations. They are not only rhetoric decorum, but structural elements, and convey knowledge about the genre, the fate of which is determined by retaliation. An interpretation of revenge tragedy is only possible if mantic providentialism is taken into account.
Prolific even by eighteenth-century standards, Eliza Haywood was the author of more than eighty titles, including short fiction, novels, periodicals, plays, poetry, and a political pamphlet for which she was briefly jailed. From her early successes (most notably Love in Excess) to later novels such as Betsy Thoughtless (her best known work) she remained widely read, yet sneered at as a ‘stupid, infamous, scribbling woman’ by the likes of Swift and Pope. Betsy Thoughtless is the story of the slow metamorphosis of the heroine from thoughtless coquette to thoughtful wife. Ironically, the most decisive moment in this development may be when Betsy decides to leave her emotionally abusive and financially punishing husband; it is only after experiencing independence that she returns to her marriage and to what becomes her husbands deathbed. Betsy Thoughtless may be the first real novel of female development in English. In this edition the text is accompanied by appendices, including writings from the period that shed light on Haywood’s life and work, and on her relationship with contemporaries such as Henry Fielding.
In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth. Dorian succumbs and murders the portrait painter Basil Haliward, who stands between him and his goal. Though in the end vice is punished and virtue rewarded, the novel remains one of the most important expressions of fin de siècle decadence. It is in the preface to the expanded edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray that Wilde coined the most famous expression of his aesthetic: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly-written. That is all.” Like other Broadview Editions, this edition includes a wide range of materials from the period that help to set the text in context. In particular, the editor locates the text both in relation to elements in the mainstream culture of the day (such as the aesthetes); and in relation to the gay subculture.
Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer ...
When Claudio breaks the new laws against vice in Vienna by getting his financee, Julietta, pregnant, a series of ethical issues is brought under scrutiny. His sister's virtue is held to ransom by the deputy rule of the city until justice is done, mercy shown, and order restored.This is among Shakespeare's most vivid dramatic projections of moral duplicity. The introduction discusses the origins of his treatment of the well-known story and examines his sources. The editor also sets the play in its historical context and offers the most comprehensive available account ofthe text's theatrical life from Restoration adaptations to present-day productions.
The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern in...
This study seeks to define the medieval literary conventions governing allusions to certain Ovidian and Virgilian tales of love in the works of Boccaccio, Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer. Using evidence from the Latin mythographers, it addresses several much-debated critical issues in medieval scholarship: questions of narrative voice, thematic unity, and purpose. Its principal contribution is to the discussion and evaluation of the French and Italian poems of love to which Chaucer was most heavily indebted. The author suggests that the love poems of Boccaccio, Machaut, and Froissart, rather than being ponderous didactic productions designed to instruct medieval audiences in the art of love, are true progeny of the Roman de la Rose,complex jeux d'esprit much closer in spirit and intention to the works of Chaucer than has been supposed.
"Will generate lively argument as both an interpretation and the instance of a method. . . . A work of first importance."--Edward Snow, author of A Study of Vermeer "This is the most searching analysis of the differences between reading and playgoing I have yet encountered, and it constitutes a decisive step forward in what is already an engrossing public debate on the subject."--Jonas Barish, author of The Antitheatrical Prejudice
Rejoining the Common Reader is suffused with the impulse that motivates Clara Claiborne Park's distinguished writing and teaching: the desire to related literature to the experience of its readers. This humane, balanced, and entertaining book will appeal to anyone who longs to recapture the pleasure of reading for personal enrichment and to teachers of literature who have grown to resent the intrusiveness of theory and theorizing and wish to reexamine what they are doing to, for, and with their students.