This is the fullest and richest account of the American Renaissance available in any literary history. The narratives in this volume made for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic. Michael D. Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States. Eric Sundquist draws upon broad cultural patterns: his account of the writings of exploration, slavery, and the frontier is an interweaving of disparate voices, outlooks and traditions. Barbara L. Packer's sources come largely from intellectual history: the theological and philosophical controversies that prepared the way for transcendentalism. Jonathan Arac's categories are formalist: he sees the development of antebellum fiction as a dialectic of prose genres, the emergence of a literary mode out of the clash of national, local and personal forms. Together, these four narratives constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. It is an achievement that will remain authoritative for our time and that will set new directions for coming decades in American literary scholarship.

As the author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been established as a major writer of the nineteenth century and the most prominent chronicler of New England and its colonial history. This introductory book for students coming to Hawthorne for the first time outlines his life and writings in a clear and accessible style. Leland S. Person also explains some of the significant cultural and social movements that influenced Hawthorne's most important writings: Puritanism, Transcendentalism and Feminism. The major works, including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, as well as Hawthorne's important short stories and non-fiction, are analysed in detail. The book also includes a brief history and survey of Hawthorne scholarship, with special emphasis on recent studies. Students of nineteenth-century American literature will find this a rewarding and engaging introduction to this remarkable writer.

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

The flagship issue fêtes Christine Brooke-Rose, one of the most innovative voices of the twentieth century, whose fiction plays challenging games with form and structure, using grammatical constraints, multiple languages, and a dicing of genre styles and theoretical discourses as an integral component of her novels. Brooke-Rose is among an unfortunate revue of writers whose work is fading out of print, rarely part of critical or academic discussion. This 320-page issue contains creative and critical responses to her fiction, theory, and criticism, written with an eye to the general literary reader unfamiliar with her output, but with enough homage, parody, imitation, and analysis to excite her devoted fan base.

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose investigates those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real' in fiction.

Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inspired deep fears and divisions throughout England. The era's emergent factory system disrupted traditional patterns and familiar ways of life. Male laborers feared the loss of meaningful work and status within their communities and families. Condemning these transformations, Britain's male writers looked longingly to an idealized past. Its women writers, however, were not so pessimistic about the future. As Susan Zlotnick argues in Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, women writers foresaw in the industrial revolution the prospect of real improvements. Zlotnick also examines the poetry and fiction produced by working-class men and women. She includes texts written by the Chartists, the largest laboring-class movement in the early nineteenth century, as well as those of the dialect tradition, the popular, commercial literature of the industrial working class after mid-century.

This meticulously edited collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Hamlet (Shakespeare) Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) Macbeth (Shakespeare) Paradise Lost (John Milton) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe) The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding) Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen) Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray) Ode to the West Wind (P. B. Shelley) Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) Odes (John Keats) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) Middlemarch (George Eliot) David Copperfield (Charles Dickens) Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy) The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Arnim) Sons and Lovers (D. H. Lawrence) The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Ward Radcliffe) Dracula (Bram Stoker) A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle) Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) Diary of a Nobody (George and Weedon Grossmith) The Time Machine (H. G. Wells) The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells) The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) The Innocence of Father Brown (G. K. Chesterton) Howards End (E. M. Forster) The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot) Ulysses (James Joyce) Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw) Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) The Second Coming (W. B. Yeats) Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) Phantastes (George MacDonald) Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie)

Misericord carvings present a fascinating corpus of medieval art which, in turn, complements our knowledge of life and belief in the late middle ages. Subjects range from the sacred to the profane and from the fantastic to the everyday, seemingly giving equal weight to the scatological and the spiritual alike. Focusing specifically on England - though with cognisance of broader European contexts - this volume offers an analysis of misericords in relation to other cultural artefacts of the period. Through a series of themed "case studies", the book places misericords firmly within the doctrinal and devotional milieu in which they were created and sited, arguing that even the apparently coarse images to be found beneath choir stalls are intimately linked to the devotional life of the medieval English Church. The analysis is complemented by a gazetteer of the most notable instances. Dr Paul Hardwick is Professor in English, Leeds Trinity University College.