This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian "periods" that have so often been rather read as differences, the book demonstrates that the sublime mode enables the transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle class is normally seen as beautiful, the book contends that the moral authority given to this icon of depth and interiority is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity's masculine character. This is the book's most important claim: rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime marks the transition to a system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it ostensibly accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.

This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.

This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.

In attempting to conceptualize feminine subjectivity beyond the familiar paradigm of dualism and within the parameters of ethics, this study examines the political and intellectual identity of contemporary poststructuralist feminism and its profound resonance with the nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman. Rooted in fundamental questions about the nexus between feminist theory and feminist literature, genre and gender, subjectivity and ethics, sexuality and textuality, and mimesis and politics, this book aims specifically to configure feminine subjectivity in the horizon of becoming - always incomplete, non-identarian, performative, unknowable, and thus paradoxically unbecoming - as it disseminates in a modality of alterity in novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. The close reading of major novels by these women writers illuminates the artistic density and ethical depth of their writing by demonstrating that these women writers rewrite the genealogy of subjectivity and invent their own Bildungsroman as a rich narrative vehicle for the feminine.

The influences of William Wordsworth’s writing and evolutionary theory—the nineteenth century’s two defining visions of nature—conflicted in the Victorian period. For Victorians, Wordsworthian nature was a caring source of inspiration and moral guidance, signaling humanity's divine origins and potential. Darwin’s nature, by contrast, appeared as an indifferent and amoral reminder of an evolutionary past that demanded participation in a brutal struggle for existence. Victorian authors like Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy grappled with these competing representations in their work. They turned to Wordsworth as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and altered his poetry in response to Darwinism, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. Darwin’s account of a material, evolutionary nature both threatened the Wordsworthian belief in nature’s transcendent value and made spiritual elevation seem more urgently necessary. Victorian authors used Wordsworth and Darwin to explore what form of transcendence, if any, could survive an evolutionary age, and reevaluated the purpose of literature in the process.

Overheard Voices examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle--through a study of the seldom-examined lyric "you"--Overheard Voices offers new insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally. The book offers detailed readings of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.

What was "information" in the early eighteenth century, and what influence did the emergence of information, as potential physical and psychological threat, have on readers of the period? Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century print culture and in twenty-first-century media studies and theory offers a unique opportunity to reconsider how and why information is figuratively imagined during the eighteenth century as an abstract yet bodily entity that can flood, suffocate, and incapacitate readers. Focusing on 1678 to 1722 -- a period that experienced impressive innovations in communication -- this study reveals that the term "information" undergoes a significant transformation with social, cultural, and literary consequences. By investigating discussions of information and media that are evident in works by literary authors, the author finds that writers like John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe confront the idea of information overload and provide case studies in literacy reform that operate on institutional, generic, and consumer levels. For example, while in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year information is infectious and citizens depend upon comets and phantoms to construct reader-controlled, decentralized media, in Swift's Tale of a Tub commonplace books and collections demonstrate a new type of organizational, or secretarial, impulse in society.

This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of literary property rights that forced authors to negotiate their copyrights not only with their publishers, but with their readers as well. The author argues that the act of taking out a copyright was more than a mere legal mechanism marking a transition from amateur to professional or artist to businessperson. Taking out a copyright had a profound impact on how audiences viewed authors, how authors perceived their profession, and how they represented individual rights and property ownership within their texts. The book is unique in the scope of its research, tracking developments from the 1820s through the 1890s, and in the way it approaches the work and careers of well-known authors. The author employs research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Government and Special Collections at the University of Iowa, drawing on an array of documents including newspaper editorials, legislative hearings, court decisions, and the public and private writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Clemens, and Emily Dickinson to demonstrate how authors found themselves in an uneasy opposition to their reading public.

First Published in 2006. This is part of the literary critcism and cutlural theory collection. Situated within the larger narrative of the symbiosis between photography and modern poetry in America during the 1930s, each text examined by the author is a discrete object constituting a series of empirical statements, expressing certain empirical truths particular to its time and place.

South Seas Encounters examines several key types of encounters between the many-faceted worlds of Oceania, Britain and the United States in the formative nineteenth century. The eleven essays collected in this volume focus not only on the effect of the two powerful, industrialized colonial powers on the cultures of the Pacific, but the effect of those cultures on the Western cultural perceptions of themselves and the wider world, including understanding encounters and exchanges in ways which do not underemphasize the agency and consequences for all participating parties. The essays also provide insights into the causes, unfolding, and consequences for both sides of a series of significant ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social encounters. This volume makes a significant contribution to increasing scholarly interest in Oceania’s place in British and American nineteenth-century cultural experiences. South Seas Encounters investigates these significant interactions and how they changed the ways that Oceanic, British, and American cultures reflected on themselves and their place in the wider world.