In the aftermath of the revolutions in theory and criticism of the last several decades, this book offers a re-reading of the development of the nineteenth-century English novel by exploring the relation of the writer to the reader.

Examines literary orphan figures and kinship structures in the nineteenth-century novelExamines a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors from the UK, US, Canada, SwitzerlandProvides an important and unique contribution to fields of family and kinship studiesIncludes an international, contemporary, critically-informed collection of interesting approachesOffers an important intervention in the most cutting-edge work on children's literature and family and kinship studiesRereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship. The chapters in the book explore how orphan characters (both child and adult) contribute to discourses of gender, home, inheritance, illegitimacy, notions of the human and the development of the novel across a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts.

This book offers a collection of essays on novels and short stories from the beginning of Victoria's reign through to the end of the nineteenth century and into our own times. The essays represent a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints on fiction, and they deal with a number of lesser-known Victorian Works as well as with some of the most canonical texts of the period. The chronological range of the volume is extended by essays which explore Victorian texts' connections with earlier literature, as well as by studies of twentieth-century novelists' responses to Victorian fiction. Overall this collection emphasizes the breadth and diversity of Victorian prose fiction and will be of interest to students and specialists alike.

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

This dissertation examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading cultures are reflected in contemporary academic and popular trends and ways of reading. I argue that we re conceive how literary value is arbitrarily structured by ideological formations of power. Like twenty-first-century literary scholars, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were very much interested in the relationship between texts and their readers. By historicizing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of 'good' and 'bad' reading practices, and 'good' and 'bad' genres, it becomes clear how ambiguous these categories still remain. Ultimately, my dissertation tracks ideological trends in the history of reading the novel, generating a discussion that resists traditionally linear narratives about taste and value production across historical reading cultures. Chapter One examines scenes of reading in novels from the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in order to track how popular 'early' novelists distinguish between ethical and affective frameworks in conversations of 'good' and 'bad' reading. Tracing these distinctions demonstrates how a problematically gendered lens of literary taste informs twentieth- and twenty-first century discussions about professional and recreational reading binaries. Chapter Two uses Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) to argue that Barrett Browning offers a complex critique of these gendered reading practices by blurring the lines between genres and ways of reading. While Chapter Two analyzes Aurora Leigh's hermeneutics of genre, Chapter Three looks at the text's long and complex reception history. Comparing nineteenth-century critiques of the text to twentieth- and twenty-first century critiques shows that while Aurora Leigh's literary value has always been framed through discussions of genre, genre functions in fundamentally different (and often contrasting) ways throughout the text's afterlife. Chapter Four examines Jane Austen's famously complex and tension-filled reception history to demonstrate how her fandom challenges the boundaries between emotionally absorptive styles of reading and more conventionally academic styles of reading. Finally, Chapter Five examines how contemporary marketing campaigns and Neo Victorian novels have worked to reclaim Victorian texts for young adults while allowing contemporary readers to mix modern social, political, and cultural tastes with retellings of documented nineteenth-century events, characters, and movements. By examining a sampling of popular young adult texts, this chapter demonstrates how Neo-Victorian texts have altered the way contemporary readers engage with nineteenth-century novels in a way that both anticipates and responds to generic malleability. Rather than focusing on a single period of time or a single set of texts, this dissertation weaves lines of connection and reflection between the reading cultures of today and those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Questions about how we define 'literary' taste and value are just as pressing today as they were over two centuries ago. Analyzing the anxieties and fears of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary cultures ultimately helps to shed light on our own.

An aesthetic of unoriginality shaped literary style and reader taste for decades of the nineteenth century. While critics in the twentieth century and beyond have upheld originality and innovation as essential characteristics of literary achievement, they were not features particularly prized by earlier American audiences, Claudia Stokes contends. On the contrary, readers were taught to value familiarity, traditionalism, and regularity. Literary originality was often seen as a mark of vulgar sensationalism and poor quality. In Old Style Stokes offers the first dedicated study of a forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic, explicating the forms, practices, conventions, and uses of unoriginality. She focuses in particular on the second quarter of the century, when improvements in printing and distribution caused literary markets to become flooded with new material, and longstanding reading practices came under threat. As readers began to prefer novelty to traditional forms, advocates openly extolled unoriginality in an effort to preserve the old literary ways. Old Style examines this era of significant literary change, during which a once-dominant aesthetic started to give way to modern preferences. If writing in the old style came to be associated with elite conservatism—a linkage that contributed to its decline in the twentieth century—it also, paradoxically provided marginalized writers—people of color, white women, and members of the working class—the literary credentials they needed to enter print. Writing in the old style could affirm an aspiring author's training, command of convention, and respectability. In dismissing unoriginality as the literary purview of the untalented or unambitious, Stokes cautions, we risk overlooking something of vital importance to generations of American writers and readers.

The book takes its lead from academic Annamaria Pagliaro’s experience straddling Australia and Italy over a thirty-year period. As both former colleagues and collaborators of Pagliaro, we editors intend to open a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the international research landscape in the fields of Italian and Anglophone studies, starting from Pagliaro’s own contribution to the creation of relations between the two cultures in the period that saw her work transnationally as Director of the Monash University Prato Centre (2005-2008).

Developing the insights of the new cultural history of politics, this book reexamines the debates over the meaning of the English constitution from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and establishes clearly its centrality to our understanding of English politics, history and national identity. With contributions from some of the most innovative historians in the field, a challenging rereading is provided not only of nineteenth-century politics, but of the current state of English political and cultural history.

A lively, scholarly, and often startling exploration of 19th-century American attitudes toward sexuality -- what we felt, thought, wrote, and said about the human body; about love, lust, intercourse, masturbation, contraception, and abortion; about the power of sexual words and images.Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibitions broadcast from pulpit and printed page by evangelical Christian elements. She describes the new sensibility that placed sex at the center of life; visionaries like Robert Owen, espousing free love, and the lively new commerce in erotica -- including newspapers like The Sunday Flash and, most famously, The National Police Gazette (which featured a legal way to write explicitly about sex). We see a rising opposition instigated by conservative New Yorkers who feared the corruption of young male clerks living in boardinghouses, deprived of parental influence. And we see how this movement led into an era of suppression -- pitting Anthony Comstock, who succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails, against the new dissenters committed to free speech -- and into the opening battles of the national cultural wars that continue to this day.

Saussure's theory of language is generally considered to be a formal theory of abstract sign-types and systems, separate from our individual and social practices of making meaning. In this challenging book, Thibault presents a different view of Saussure. Paying close attention to the original texts, including Cours de linguistique generale, he demonstrates that Saussure was centrally concerned with trying to formulate a theory of how meanings are made.