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Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, American Snobs shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

This book includes twenty-eight chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as a multi-disciplinary artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, music, dance, sculpture, architecture, historiography, life writing and queer and Biblical aesthetics. The Companion explores topics such as Lawrence’s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, his manifold modes of performance, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. Investigation of Lawrence’s engagements with the work and themes of his fellow modernists represents him as more ‘modernist’ and less anti-aesthetic than has hitherto been the case; and his attitudes towards the working-classes, and anticipation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School, modern ecocriticism and queer theory, are presented as revealing him to be more progressive than has previously been recognised. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence’s continuing aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.

This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, and students in countries around the world; how she is translated into multiple languages; and how her life is transformed into global contemporary biofiction. The 24 authors hail from regions around the world: West and East Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, North and South America, East Asia and the Pacific Islands. They write about Woolf’s reception in Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan and Australia. The Edinburgh Companion is dialogic and comparative, incorporating both transnational and local tendencies insofar as they epitomise Woolf’s global reception and legacy. It contests the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ binary, offering new models for Woolf global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.

This volume presents a research-led, interdisciplinary examination of existing scholarship as well as new research on twentieth-century newspaper and periodical history across Britain and Ireland during a key period of change and development into the twenty-first century. It covers an important period of expansion (1900-2017) in periodical and press history across the four nations of Britain (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) and Ireland, concentrating on how the development of twentieth-century print communication can be assessed via cross-border comparisons and contrasts. Its thirty-three chapters are interspersed with case studies specific to the themes covered, allowing synchronic and diachronic coverage via macro as well as micro studies. It is designed to provide readers with a clear survey of the current state of research in the field, drawing on contemporary methodologies, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of the field and offering an indication of areas ripe for further work. The impact on the field of digital media and archives will fully inform discussions of the print archive where relevant. While the volume meets a need amongst scholars of British and Irish culture, it will also be of tremendous value to those working in other national traditions, offering insight into press trade connections into European and trans-oceanic counterparts, highlighting matters related to national and trans-national identities, migration, skills and knowledge exchange and the place of such texts in a globalised marketplace.

Despite the exceptional literary quality, remarkable conceptual sophistication and compelling socio-historical interest of Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, her fiction has received relatively little critical attention in comparison to the work of such acknowledged giants of the modern canon as, for example, Woolf and Joyce. The past decade has seen a lively burgeoning of interest in Bowen’s work, recent scholarship focusing with a new intensity on the question of the relationship between Bowen’s writing and the socio-political matrix from which it emerges. Situating itself within this new wave of scholarship and engaging closely with its socio-historical and literary-critical concerns, this book sets out to offer a provocative and substantial new account of Bowen’s fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen’s virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender.

This book is conceived as a sustained critical study of John Keats’s collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820). It was published in the 2020 bicentenary. It treats the collection as an authorially organised and thematically unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. An important thread, which I follow through the volume as a major unifying principle, has also gone largely unnoticed by critics, since it is not self-evident when we read the poems individually and outside the book’s overarching intellectual context. The guiding theme behind 1820 I propose, is the persistent emphasis on different shades and types of an ancient major medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry, namely melancholy, which was of interest to Keats through his medical training, temperament, and his delighted reading of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. This emotional area was considerably richer and more complex than today’s paler reflection in the word ‘melancholy’, and it could range between suicidal thoughts, love illness, manic hilarity, and inspired creativity in poetry, art and music. In this design the clinching closure comes with ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which exuberantly attributes value to the emotional state as a form of creative inspiration driving the 1820 volume.

This collection of original essays highlights the intertwined fates of the modern short story and periodical culture in the period 1880–1950, the heyday of magazine short fiction in Britain. Through case studies that focus on particular magazines, short stories and authors, chapters investigate the presence, status and functioning of short stories within a variety of periodical publications – highbrow and popular, mainstream and specialised, middlebrow and avant-garde. Examining the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories, this essay collection foregrounds the ways in which magazines and periodicals shaped conversations about the short story form and prompted or provoked writers into developing the genre.

This book chronicles and theorises face and body masking in arts and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the new millennium. While featuring the modernist era in France, analyses include commentary on performers and visual artists from the margins of the European continent: Ireland and the Baltics; Denmark and the Mediterranean. Representations of silent Pierrots on stage are contrasted with images of fixed-form maskers and masquerades; two-dimensional depictions in paintings and photographs further the study of the form-altered human figure. The relationship of the European avant-garde with indigenous masquerade from Africa and the Americas is discussed and presented in a series of eighteen photographic counterpoints. Modernist explorations of the masked gaze and the nature of looking with the painted face are considered. Meanings suggested by the disguised body in motion and in stasis are investigated via citations of the work of a wide range of masqueraders: Akarova, Bernhardt, Cahun, Höch, Fuller, Mnouchkine, Stein and Wigman, as well as Artaud, Barrault, Cocteau, Copeau, Deburau, Fo, Milhaud and Picasso. Connections between modernist disguising with manifestations of masquerade in daily life, fashion, fine art, media, opera and theatre are proposed while arguing that masking and the carnivalesque are omnipresent in contemporary culture. Modernist Disguise provides greater understanding of the impact of facial masking upon everyday interactions and perceptions experienced, for instance, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The book proposes an interdisciplinary and international lexicon for critical conversation on masking objects, mask play and masquerade as performance.

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

The idea of ‘new media’ is nothing new. Long before Twitter and Facebook, the rise of new periodical genres and formats provided opportunities for Victorian women writers and readers to participate in popular print culture as never before. This study illuminates the relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer the expansion and diversification of newspaper and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change. It includes discussion of canonical women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures such as Eliza Cook, Frances Brown, Eliza Meteyard, and Rose Ellen Hendriks. In addition, it explores the networks of women writers connected with cheap family magazines such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal during the 1830s and ’40s. It also examines the ways women readers actively responded to a robust popular print culture by creating scrapbooks and engaging in forms of celebrity worship. The book closes with discussion of the ways Victorian women’s participation in popular print culture anticipates our own engagement with new media in the twenty-first century.

Oscar Wilde’s political identity informed his literary writings, which were motivated by his revolutionary outlook as much as they were driven by his Paterian “passion for sensations”. Addressing his radical engagements with anarchism, socialism and anticolonial thought, this monograph provides a new interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism and of his major works by emphasising the importance of progressive politics to his positioning and self-identification within late Victorian literary culture. Consisting of previously unpublished material, it provides a politicised and historicised account of Wilde’s key works by situating them within the framework of his very pronounced – but to date critically under-recognised and as yet untheorised - ideological commitment to these radical political causes. This book interprets Wilde’s better-known works against the important political contexts addressed in his correspondence, reviews, lectures and journalism, and through his personal relationships with contemporary radicals.

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

Newspapers are constantly lying in the worlds of Victorian novels, from the false report of John Harmon’s death in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) to allegations of extramarital affairs in Phineas Finn (1867-1868). Yet characters continue to believe what they read in the newspaper, assuming that news must be recent, relevant, and true. Victorian novels thus explore the contradictory logic of news: claims to journalistic reality sit uneasily alongside unrepresentative, malicious, or even false news. This book argues that nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news through a shifting series of metaphors, analogies, and plots. By incorporating newspapers and news discourse into their narratives, Victorian novels experimented with the ways that generic and formal qualities might reshape communal and national imaginings. This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news: Charles Dickens interrogates the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling, while Anthony Trollope explores novelistic bildung in serial form; the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locate melodrama in realist discourses, whereas Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill represents a hybrid minority experience. At the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper’s influence on society.

A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and other writing, including correspondence, literary criticism, prose fiction and visual art. Celebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and literary traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author’s career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop’s work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers.

This book makes a new case for “reading for content,” fleshing out its theoretical claims via readings of Victorian fiction. Questioning the academic assumption that an emphasis on content is aesthetically unsophisticated or theoretically naïve, it argues that the new formalism, like the old, fails to recognize the limits of its own account of the experience of reading and the justifications for literary study. As the philosophical ideas in Victorian narratives demonstrate, writers of literature often use literary form as a means to convey content, and enjoying such books involves precisely engaging, thinking through, and being excited by that content. Moreover, reading for the content in this way does not require denying either a text’s aesthetic nature or historical origins, but is in fact an important way of acknowledging both.

Rural Modernity in Britain argues that the rural areas of twentieth-century Britain were impacted by modernization just as much—if not more—than urban and suburban areas. It shifts the focus for studies of modernity and modernism onto the art, industries, and everyday life of rural people and places. In the early twentieth century, rural areas experienced economic depression, the expansion of transportation and communication networks, the roll out of electricity, the loss of land, and the erosion of local identities. Who celebrated these changes? Who resisted them? Who documented them? The fifteen chapters of Rural Modernity address these questions through investigations into fiction, non-fiction, film, music, and painting, among other genres and media. They focus on men and women writers and artists, with progressive, moderate, or conservative politics, modernist, middlebrow, or proletarian tastes, from Scottish, Welsh, and English regions. Together, the chapters make an interdisciplinary case that the rural means more than just the often-studied countryside of southern England, a retreat from the consequences of modernity; rather, the rural emerges as a source for new versions of the modern, with an active role in the formation and development of British experiences and representations of modernity.

Scottish Colonial Literature is a comprehensive study of Scottish colonial writing before 1707. It brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial literature before the Union of Parliaments. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. Offering case studies relating to colonial undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and at the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s), Scottish Colonial Literature explores how literature and culture shaped Scotland's colonial ventures in the seventeenth century. In addition, it considers works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic so as to illuminate how the Atlantic shaped seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. One key question running through the book is the relationship between art and ideology. Textual narratives were powerful instruments of empire-building throughout the early modern period. This book focuses on utopianism as a framework that authors used to claim power over the Atlantic. In the Scottish context, the intersections between utopianism and colonialism shed light on the ambiguous narratives of possession and dispossession as well as internal and external colonialism in Scottish colonial writing of the seventeenth century. Scottish Colonial Literature enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature.

This work is the first book-length study of Scottish Great War literature. Rather than arguing the war exerted a singular influence on the country’s writing, the collection highlights the variety of literary, social, political, and philosophical reverberations of the war in Scotland literature. Part one of the collection presents multi-text case studies of nationalism, pastoralism, Scottish Great War prose, popular literature, women’s, letters to the editor, Gaelic writing, and philosophy. Part two contains essays devoted to individual authors, including canonical figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn and John Buchan, as well as peripheral authors such as George A. C. Mackinlay, Charles Murray and Ewart Alan Mackintosh.

This book contends that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged – whether these be homosexuality, pygmalionism, necrophilia, or paedophilia – are often embedded and encrypted in sculptures. The three-dimensionality of the sculptural body, its ubiquity in Victorian popular culture, its increasing visibility in public galleries, and the full or partial nudity of classical statues on display are some of the key reasons that underpin this phenomenon. It argues that, in such literature, sculpture often functions as a form of textual ‘Secretum’ in which forbidden love becomes available for recovery and circulation by those ‘in the know’, manifesting through sensory signification, through literal and metaphorical forms of tactility, and at the intersections between vision and touch.

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.