Constructing Coleridge examines Coleridge's penchant for re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they preferred in these trying circumstances.

This is the story of a most ingenious invention: the novel. Desribed for the first time in The Rise of The Novel, Ian Watt's landmark classic reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time.In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers -- Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding -- invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. With penetrating and original readings of thei...

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. T...

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern w...

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world.The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature.

Incorporating a broad range of contemporary scholarship, A History of Victorian Literature presents an overview of the literature produced in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, with fresh consideration of both major figures and some of the era's less familiar authors. Part of the Blackwell Histories of Literature series, the book describes the development of the Victorian literary movement and places it within its cultural, social and political context.A wide-rangi...

The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and intellectual life of one of the most challenging and wide-ranging writers in English literary history. Compiler of the first great English dictionary, editor of Shakespeare, biographer and critic of the English poets, author both of the influential journal Rambler and the popular fiction Rasselas, and one of the most engaging conversationalists in literary culture, Johnson is here ...

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Com...

The Carlyles at Home and Abroad explores the extensive influence of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle in England and Scotland, Europe, and the United States. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, such as aesthetics, history, biography, literature, travel writing, feminism and race. The result is a volume that offers a fresh assessment of the couple as national and international figures.

An absorbing study of the evolution of sentiment in Victorian life and literatureWhat is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both sci...

During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct boo...

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, the essays in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century propose a re-examination of these relationships. Together, they expose some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted within the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Individual essays examine the influence of the wor...