This work presents some major influences on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (especially Shakespeare), but also deals with the influence of Doyle on others, notably T.S. Eliot. Other essays deal with onomastics, religion, and race.

Offers a novel interpretation of Chaucer as a "fuzzy Jew", a conflicted descendant of Conversos, who created the complex antisemitic character of the Prioress. Following a psycho-historical approach, suggests that the Prioress was raped as a child by a father-figure and that she projects the blame onto the Jews, who were demonized by her society. Associates child victimization with the alleged victimization felt by Chaucer for his own suffering as a child belonging to a group that had to conceal its identity. In view of Chaucer's putative Jewish heritage, offers kabbalistic perspectives on his work.

Born and brought up in a village-tradesman family, he broke away, re-inventing himself first as a professional architect, and then as a successful man of letters. The imagined societies of his rural novels are significantly selective: he ignores, marginalizes, or treats dismissively the mass of rural poor, the agricultural labourers, whose condition was a running concern of the nineteenth century. His novels focus on the independent group to which his family belonged: 'an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above' the agricultural labourers, as he pointedly tells us. His fictions are coloured with a rich rural conservatism where social attitudes are concerned. Hardy's Wessex countryside is to be valued as metaphor, not reportage: for the latter we have to turn to that huge bulk of contemporary material highlighting the situation of the agricultural poor, nowhere more severely felt than in Dorset. It is no wonder that his early readers were puzzled.

William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific writer now as obscure as he once was famous, reinvented the gothic novel in an English setting, a radical re-write of Scott's model of the historical romance and an antecedent of the contemporary urban gothic of Dickens and Reynolds. This study examines Ainsworth's literary career from a writer of magazine tales of terror in the 1820s to the massive influence of his gothic/Newgate romance of 1834, Rookwood; his friendships with Lamb, Lockhart, and Dickens; his fall from literary grace during the Newgate controversy (a moral panic engendered by the supposedly pernicious effects of cheap, theatrical adaptations of Ainsworth's underworld romance Jack Sheppard). legacy of Ainsworth's subsequent historical novels, taking The Lancashire Witches to be his final, major work and the last of the original gothic novels. The novels The Tower of London, Guy Fawkes, Old St. Paul's and Windsor Castle are read as epic tragedy rather than simply as bad romance. The study re-examines Ainsworth's singular vision of the outlaw, English history and religious intolerance as being at political odds with the new Victorian value system, particularly with regard to Catholics and the urban poor. A final chapter explores Ainsworth's later life and fiction and his adoption by his native Mancunians as The Lancashire Novelist. The book includes extracts from Ainsworth's correspondence and journalism, detailing his close relationship with, among others, Scott, Dickens, Forster, Thackeray, Cruikshank, Bulwer-Lytton and G.P.R. James.

The purpose of this book is to examine the many heterosexual configurations in the plays and to demonstrate by the accumulation of evidence that the actions of Shaw's chief characters are typically the result of their sexual concerns, often coupled with issues of principle. This book is a must for all Shaw specialists and will be of great interest to teachers and students of English and Continental drama and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The American 1920s had many names: the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Dry Decade, and the Flapper generation. Whatever the moniker, these years saw the birth of modern America. This volume shows the many colorful ways the decade altered America, its people, and its future. American Popular Culture Through History volumes include a timeline, cost comparisons, chapter bibliographies, and a subject index. Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Damon Runyon presented distinct literary visions of the world. Jazz, blues, and country music erupted onto the airwaves. The exploits of Babe Ruth and Murderers' Row helped save baseball from its scandals, while such players as Red Grange and Notre Dame's Four Horsemen brought football to national prominence. Yo-yos, crossword puzzles, and erector sets appeared, along with fads like dance marathons and flagpole sitting. Rudolph Valentino, talkies, and Clara BoW's It girl appeared on the silver screen. Prohibition indirectly led to bootlegging and speakeasies, while the growing rebelliousness of teenagers highlighted an increasing generation gap.

Psychohistorian Simms, an American and Israeli citizen who lives in New Zealand, looks closely at Female Quixote, the 1752 the English narrative by Lennox, bypassing rather than challenging the current feminist, post-colonialist, and post-modernist perspectives. It deals with a humane and sympathet

Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction; 1. On sundry seductresses; 2. The art of charming the senses; 3. Refinement and barbarity; 4. Angels and demons; 5. Social seduction; 6. The writer as seducer: first attempts; 7. To please or not to please; 8. Anti-seduction and self-seduction; Bibliography; Index; Names Cited

This study addresses the rich array of past and current scholarship and explores a new angle - Jane Austen's idea of personal reform precipitating societal transformation. It presents the ways in which she explores the complex nature of transformation through her inversion of the commonly held definitions of masks, mirrors and mirages - a trio not explored by other scholars and critics. As a subversive conservative, Austen seems most interested in examining the middle space existent in the nature of transformation. This study presents Austen amidst French (rather than English) contemporaries to establish her relationship to national and continental events, and, in exploring how she inverts the definitions of masks, mirrors and mirages, elucidates her political commentary in a new way.