John Wilson Croker, a forgotten man of 19th-century politics and letters, is given new life in this book. Drawing on previously unpublished Croker archives held in US universities, the contemporary press, and other sources, author Robert Portsmouth provides a substantial re-interpretation of the life and times of Croker. As a parliamentarian, early 'spin-doctor, ' and close advisor to Sir Robert Peel, George Canning, and the Duke of Wellington, Croker probably had greater influence on ministerial policy and popular opinion than all but a handful of his contemporaries. He was a friend of famous literary figures like Walter Scott, but his work as a popular critic won him the enduring enmity of Shelley, Lady Morgan, T.B. Macaulay, and others, whose vilification of him as a 'slashing' reviewer and bigoted Tory opponent of all reform has concealed his much more significant political work and ideas. In fact, Croker was a keen advocate of moderate parliamentary, social, and economic reforms. He had been, since he was a Dublin student campaigning for 'conciliatory Catholic Emancipation, ' in opposition to both 'ultra-Protestants' as well as sectarian 'ultra-Catholics', and viewed his political philosophy for a unitary via media of opposition to extremes as something of a tradition of enlightened Irish thought stretching from Swift to Burke. While his ambition to improve the state of his homeland and unite its people would end in failure, John Wilson Croker and his predominantly Irish press circle saw essentially the same philosophy succeed in Britain after 1830 when they laid the foundations for modern parliamentary Conservatism by 'inventing' the new Conservative party as a moderate reforming and conciliatory alternative to both 'ultra Tories' and 'ultra-Whigs

Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive, even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after the opening of the USSR's spekstrahn, those enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and book banning in colonial countries also demonstrates censorship's formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines these and other developments across twelve countries, from the Enlightenment to the present day, offering case studies from the French revolution to Internet China. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final, failed version of national control?

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.