Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age.

In the wake of the 2009 Darwin bicentenary, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is becoming as well known for his public attack on Darwin's character and the basis of his scientific authority as for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. In the first monograph devoted to Butler's ideas for over twenty years, David Gillott offers a much-needed reappraisal of Butler's work and shows how Lamarckian ideas pervaded the whole of Butler's wide-ranging ouevre, and not merely his evolutionary theory. In particular, he argues that Lamarckism was the foundation on which Butler's attempt to undermine professional authority in a variety of disciplines was based. Samuel Butler against the Professionals provides new insight into a fascinating but often misunderstood writer, and on the surprisingly broad application of Lamarckian ideas in the decades following publication of the Origin of Species.

Donated by Sydney Harris.

This new edition of Harold Innis's essays, published on the occasion of his centenary, assembles his most significant and representative writing. Included are many of Innis's essays on cultural issues and economic development - subjects he explored throughout his life - that have not been readily accessible before.

Notework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures.

Originally published in 1948, this book discusses various aspects of the life and works of the novelist Samuel Butler, author of Erehwon.

The twelve edited volumes of Orwell's non-fiction, collected for the first time in one invaluable ebook. A rich treasure trove of material, this unique collection includes Orwell's reviews, broadcasts, notebooks, wartime diaries, articles on socialism and censorship, correspondence with luminaries such as Arthur Koestler, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and famous essays such as 'Politics and the English Language', 'Why I Write' and 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'. Edited by Professor Peter Davison, the collection encompasses twelve annotated volumes and ranges across the whole of Orwell's writing life, from 1903 to 1950. As well as providing an unparalleled insight into Orwell's life and works, the volume offers a wonderful overview of the social, literary and political events of the thirties and forties. It will be an invaluable resource for fans, students and scholars alike. Contents: A Kind of Compulsion (1903-36) Facing Unpleasant Facts (1937-39) A Patriot After All (1940-41) All Propaganda is Lies (1941-42) Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (1942-43) Two Wasted Years (1943) I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (1943-44) I Belong to the Left (1945) Smothered Under Journalism (1946) It is What I Think (1947-48) Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living (1949-50) The Lost Orwell