Although people may not realize it, the modern Christmas book market carries on a Victorian legacy. An explosion of Christmas print matter reinvigorated and regularized the holiday during the mid-Victorian period, infusing Christmas with emotionally-charged expectations of reading. Tara Moore elucidates the evolution of Christmas publishing trends that dictated authors writing schedules and reflected gift-giving rituals. As Victorian shopping customs evolved, publishers satisfied consumers with a range of holiday print matter, including novels, ghost stories, periodicals, children s books, and poetry. Ultimately, Victorian Christmas in Print analyzes how the revitalized holiday and the flurry of texts supporting it contributed to English national identity.

Charlotte Riddell’s The Uninhabited House (1875) tells the story of River Hall and the secrets that are hidden behind its doors. Within this haunted house, Riddell combines the supernatural with Victorian anxieties over stolen inheritance, crime, greed, and class mobility. This new Broadview Edition includes a detailed biography of Charlotte Riddell and illustrations from the original appearance of the novella in Routledge’s Magazine; it also includes Riddell’s ghost story “The Open Door” (1882), which serves as a useful companion text for The Uninhabited House. The contextual material in the edition highlights Victorian cultural, historical, and literary influences on Riddell’s text, including women’s contributions to the ghost story, print culture, and the development of supernatural fiction; the link between ghost stories and the holidays; and the haunted house, ghost hunting, and popular beliefs about ghosts in the Victorian era.

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts. Contributors to this volume analyze the social, political, and cultural implications of scenes involving food and dining and illustrate how "aesthetic" notions of culinary preparation are often undercut by the actual practices of cooking and eating. As contributors interrogate the values and meanings behind culinary discourses, they complicate commonplace notions about American identity and question the power structure behind food production and consumption.

Discusses crucial moments in the historical development of natural theology in England from the time of Francis Bacon to that of Charles Darwin. While the argument from design remains the rhetorical method of choice for natural theologians throughout the three centuries in question, the locus and object of design undergo a change.

In this book, Judith Thompson restores a powerful but long-suppressed voice to our understanding of British Romanticism. Drawing on newly discovered archives, this book offers the first full-length study of the poetry of John Thelwallas well as his partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

Thomas Brennan finds roots of the 'sensibility of trauma' by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses - the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.

Combining historical poetics and book history, Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries shows Romanticism as characterized by tropes and forms that were jointly produced by literary circles. To show these connections, Fulford pulls from a wealth of print material including political squibs, magazine essays, illustrated tour poems, and journals.

Nichols chronicles the Enlightenment view of 'Nature' as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic 'nature' characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship, he draws new conclusions about 21st-century ideas of nature.

The first study of the productions of the minor theatres, how they were adapted to appeal to the local patrons and the audiences who worked and lived in these communities.