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Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
The Wanderer or Female Difficulties is the tale of a penniless emigree from Revolutionary France trying to earn her living in England while guarding her own secrets. Combining the best elements of the Gothic and historical novels, this newly appreciated work is an extraordinary piece ofRomantic fiction. Burney's tough comedy offers a satiric view of complacent middle-class insularity that echoes Godwin and Wollstonecraft's attacks on the English social structure. The problems of the new feminism and of the old anti-feminism are explored in the relationship between the heroine andher English patroness and rival, the Wollstonecraftian Elinor Joddrel, and the racism inherent within both the French and British empires is exposed when the emigree disguises herself as a black woman. This edition is fully annotated with appendices on the French Revolution, race relations, amusements, and geography and a previously unpublished manuscript revealing the connection between The Wanderer and Camilla.
In this book, Felicity Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representations of human difference in England and its empire during the long eighteenth century. With a special focus on women's writing, Nussbaum analyzes canonical and lesser-known novels and plays from the Restoration to abolition. She considers a range of anomalies (defects, disease, and disability) as they intermingle with ideas of femininity, masculinity, and race to define 'normalcy' as national identity. Incorporating writings by Behn, Burney, and the Bluestockings, as well as Southerne, Shaftesbury, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano, Nussbaum treats a range of disabilities - being mute, blind, lame - and physical oddities such as eunuchism and giantism as they are inflected by emerging notions of a racial femininity and masculinity. She shows that these corporeal features, perceived as aberrant and extraordinary, combine in the popular imagination to reveal a repertory of differences located between the extremes of splendid and horrid novelty.
Best known as a novelist and social satirist whose work anticipated Jane Austen's, Frances Burney (1752-1840) has also been recognized as an important writer in the history of feminist literature. Julia Epstein now offers a new interpretation of Burney and her work: that Burney's anger at the economic and social conditions of women emerges in her writing in moments of barely contained violence, and that her representations of violence and hostility provide a key to Burney's literary power. The Iron Pen situates Burney's writings within the sociopolitical context of the late eighteenth century and proposes a new approach to the development of the novel of manners. In addition, Epstein present...
Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Be...
Focusing on dramatic criticism, this book explores the self authorizing strategies of writers such as Jonson, Dryden, Aphra Behn, Thomas Rymer, Jeremy Collier and Joseph Addison. Cannan focuses on how they established themselves as critics, and paved the way for the birth of dramatic criticism in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England.
The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined. The life-writings within this anthology span the modern history of the genre itself, with writers drawn from as early as the seventeenth century and as late as the 1990s.
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.