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Another volume in the distinguished annual
Assembles fourteen original essays on Gaskell, the Victorian novelist of social problem fiction
This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.
This is the first study of the literary theories of H. G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his entire career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.
This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres (the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel) using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction, Lady Audley's Secret, as a starting point
Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey's Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.
The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation—in principle, they were ‘for everyone’—they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms—from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings—and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
The first detailed study on the subject of Victorian unfinished novels, this book sheds further light on novels by major authors that have been neglected by critical studies and focuses in a new way on critically acclaimed masterpieces, offering a counter-reading of the nineteenth-century literary canon.
This thought-provoking book delineates how fiction developed from Dickens's intensely Christological worldview to Gissing's self-deceptive and pessimistic humanism, from Collins's and Gaskell's patholo-gized womanhood to Hardy's intellectual wasteland where there is no room for redemption and moral rebirth. Victorian Disharmonies provides a fresh account of crucial fictional texts of the age, while its lively presentation of the literary scene will prove stimulating to readers interested in the history of Victorianism as a paradigmatic phenomenon of British culture. --Book Jacket.
In The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, some of the most prominent Hardy specialists working today offer an overview of Hardy scholarship and suggest new directions in Hardy studies. The contributors cover virtually every area relevant to Hardy's fiction and poetry, including philosophy, palaeontology, biography, science, film, popular culture, beliefs, gender, music, masculinity, tragedy, topography, psychology, metaphysics, illustration, bibliographical studies and contemporary response. While several collections have surveyed the Hardy landscape, no previous volume has been composed especially for scholars and advanced graduate students. This companion is specially designed to aid original research on Hardy and serve as the critical basis for Hardy studies in the new millennium. Among the features are a comprehensive bibliography that includes not only works in English but, in acknowledgment of Hardy's explosion in popularity around the world, also works in languages other than English.