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Ireland is a strange, but also a frightening, place – or so you are led to believe by popular culture which trades in a now traditional view of Ireland as a site of queer goings on. Recent horror films like Hellboy II merely recycle a very recognisable trope in cinematic tradition which associates Ireland with either quaint Celtic charm or grand Gothic guignol. While the cinematic incarnation of these Gothic Irish associations is relatively recent, it draws on a long history of such representations in literary terms, a tradition that goes back to the beginnings of the genre in the mid-eighteenth century. This version of Ireland as a Gothic madhouse had to be confronted by Irish writers, but rather than reject it a great many of them, on first glance, appear to have embraced it enthusiastically, allowing the tropes and themes of the Gothic to infect practically everything they wrote. This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the ‘beginnings’ of Irish Gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland.

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

John Macrone (1809-1837), Dickens's first publisher, was also Scott's first biographer. His unfinished life of Scott, filled with unique anecdotes and sidelights on the reception of the Waverley Novels, is here published for the first time, with an introduction which covers his career and personality in detail.

The Frankfurt School theoretical tendency and the individual thinkers connected with it have exercised an enormous influence across a broad spectrum of contemporary cultural scholarship. Modernist studies have been no exception in this regard. The more that modernist studies in recent years have taken shape as a distinct field of inquiry, the more intensely have contemporary scholars looked to the Frankfurt School legacy to explain key problems that arise in their research and teaching. In the specific case of modernism, however, there exists an even stronger motivation for the interest and influence of Frankfurt School critical theory: the close, multifaceted attention the Frankfurt School thinkers gave to the nature of modernity and the social, political, and aesthetic implications of it. Arguably, there is an “elective affinity” between the culture of artistic modernism, which responds to and artistically reshapes typical experiences of modernity, and Frankfurt School critical theory, which takes modern experience and its transformations as a primary object of critical reflection. Just as modernist artists responded to new modern experiences by reconceiving the style, form, and criteria of value for works of art, so too the key figures of the Frankfurt School developed daringly innovative, interdisciplinary critical approaches to the emerging phenomena of modern life. Coming out of and responding to the same matrix of problems, modernism and Frankfurt School theory exhibit parallel, complementary styles of thought in their respective figural and theoretical idioms.

This book argues for a generative relationship between economic thought and dramatic form in early modern English drama by examining representations of economic exchange in plays and mercantile treatises written in the early decades the seventeenth century when economic thinkers associated with “mercantilism” were re-examined how they conceptualised and depicted commerce as a system. Treatises by Thomas Milles, Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun are considered alongside plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Walter Mountfort, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome. Adapting approaches pioneered by scholars of Science Studies and the Rhetoric of Economics, Bradley Ryner compares the formal features of mercantile treatises and plays. He argues that Renaissance playwrights crafted absorbingly self-reflexive models of economic exchange by making productive use of the imperfection of their metaphors, the representational instability of their props and characters, the necessarily limited vantage points of their audiences, and the interpretive energies and generic expectations of these audiences. He shows how these techniques facilitated thinking through questions that were pertinent to seventeenth-century audiences, such as how to conceptualise royal finanace, currency exchange, global trade, and poverty as part of a systemic totality -- an ‘economy’ in the modern sense.

This book explains how, under the influence of the new “mental materialism” that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontës and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology, one that was no longer bound by the idealizing presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology, and which is closely related to Nietzsche’s physiological theory of will to power (itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer). On this reading, the Brontës and George Eliot participate, with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, in the beginnings of the modernist turn toward a strictly naturalistic moral psychology, one that is “non-moral” or “post-moral.”

This book examines how Thomas Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women, and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy’s treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output, this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning.