The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

Edited by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson

This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel from a vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including a foreword by Lennard J. Davis.

Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood in rather rudimentary symbolic terms—the blindness of Rochester and the “madness” of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability resists this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of perspectives—cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies—the essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single literary text, The Madwoman and the Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.

“Literary academics who have been meaning to investigate disability studies but have not done so will discover, with pleasure, an approach that can open up well-known texts to fresh readings. Not only that: they will also experience some consciousness-raising. The Madwoman and the Blindman is a welcome addition both to Brontë scholarship and to disability studies.” —Beth Newman, associate professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Southern Methodist University

“The Madwoman and the Blindman engages, interrogates, and carries out disability studies scholarship and critical approaches to a singular and major literary text, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. To my knowledge, it is the only volume of its kind and it will be a much-discussed contribution to disability studies.” —Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Professor of English, The Ohio State University

Purchase from The Ohio State University Press.

A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons

By Caroline Dakers

This is the spectacular rags-to-riches story of James Morrison (1789-1857), who began life humbly but through hard work and entrepreneurial brilliance acquired a fortune unequalled in nineteenth-century England. Using the extensive Morrison archive, Caroline Dakers presents the first substantial biography of the richest commoner in England, recounting the details of Morrison's personal life while also placing him in the Victorian age of enterprise that made his success possible. An affectionate husband and father of ten, Morrison made his first fortune in textiles, then a second in international finance. He invested in North American railways, was involved in global trade from Canton to Valparaiso, created hundreds of jobs, and relished the challenges of 'the science of business'. His success enabled him to acquire land, houses, and works of art on a scale to rival the grandest of aristocrats.

Visit the Yale Books blog to read an extract.

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A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

By Barbara Black

In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness?

A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain’s military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens’s and Thackeray’s acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton’s curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill’s The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde’s clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope’s novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London’s clubland—this all-important room of his own—comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.

“This splendid book boldly lifts the curtain and raises the sash of Victorian private gentlemen’s clubs, which often were more comfortable, intimate, and yet sociable than the prized domestic hearth. According to Professor Black, clubs functioned as heterotopic spaces that were simultaneously apart from and part of the social fabric that constituted them. This is a beautifully conceived, thoroughly researched, and deftly argued book that expands our awareness of the homosocial associations out of which personal and national identities were forged in the nineteenth century and persist, with modifications and adjustments, even today.”

Karen S. Chase Levenson — Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English, University of Virginia

“Barbara Black’s wonderfully informative discussion of nineteenth-century London club culture is something of a revelation. She makes us see how significant were men’s clubs in the social life of the expanding propertied classes of Britain; how ubiquitous, if critically overlooked, are their representations in the Victorian novel and the Victorian press; and how powerfully the sociability they fostered has shaped notions of English masculinity and national identity. That she does so in prose that is itself sociable—often witty and always appealing—is an added pleasure.”

Eileen Gillooly — Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and Associate Faculty in English, Columbia University

Purchase from Ohio University Press • Swallow Press. 

Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem

By Catherine Robson

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived.

Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.

Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

"Heart Beats is a work of passionate intelligence—sensitive to issues of class and to the place of recitation in the disciplining of minds and bodies, but at the same time open to the idea that verse memorization can liberate and shape social practices for the better." —John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Robson's history of memorized poetry is impressive in every way: imaginatively conceived and massively researched, it holds important implications for the way we teach and read." —Leah Price, Harvard University

"This innovative book gives an institutional history of memorizing poetry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schools, and provides an account of the psychological effects of this practice in the lives of students who memorized. A key scholarly book in the field, this book is a winner." —Linda Peterson, Yale University

Purchase from Princeton. 

Transatlantic Sensations

Edited by Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton, and Kristin N. Huston.  Featuring a preface by David S. Reynolds. Ashgate Press, 2012.

Bringing together sensation writing and transatlantic studies, this collection makes a convincing case for the symbiotic relationship between literary works on both sides of the Atlantic. Transatlantic Sensations begins with the 'prehistories' of the genre, looking at the dialogue and debate generated by the publication of sentimental and gothic fiction by William Godwin, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown.Thus establishing a context for the treatment of works by Louisa May Alcott, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dion Boucicault, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Lippard, Charles Reade, Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Thompson, the volume takes up a wide range of sensational topics including sexuality, slavery, criminal punishment, literary piracy, mesmerism, and the metaphors of foreign literary invasion and diseased reading. Concluding essays offer a reassessment of the realist and domestic fiction of George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Thomas Hardy in the context of transatlantic sensationalism, emphasizing the evolution of the genre throughout the century and mapping a new transatlantic lineage for this immensely popular literary form. The book's final essay examines an international kidnapping case that was a journalistic sensation at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Touching God: Hopkins and Love

By Duc Dau

Love is often called a leap of faith. But can faith be described as a leap of love? In Touching God: Hopkins and Love, Duc Dau argues that the conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Roman Catholicism was one of his most romantic acts. Touching God is the first book devoted to love in the writings of Hopkins, illuminating our understanding of him as a romantic poet. Discussions of desire in Hopkins’ poetry have focused on his unrequited attraction to men. In contrast, Dau turns to Luce Irigaray's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of mutual touch to uncover the desire Hopkins cultivated and celebrated: his love for Christ. This book demonstrates how descriptions of touching played a vital role in the poet’s vision of spiritual eroticism. Forging a new way of reading desire and the body in Hopkins’ writings, the work offers fresh interpretations of his poetry.

"Duc Dau has written an exciting and provocative book, […] a worthy and timely addition to the world of Hopkins scholarship, bringing a fresh, innovative, and at times deliberately challenging approach to the too-often-overlooked area of love in the writing of Hopkins. […] Far from denying the corporeal, this approach rightly draws attention to a frequently overlooked rich spiritual eroticism found nestling at the very heart of so much of Hopkins’s writing." — Review, The Hopkins Quarterly

"It is a rare book that can speak to a feminist or queer reader as well as a traditional Catholic; Touching God is one such book." — Frederick Roden, author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture 

"This study will contribute to a new understanding not only for readers of Hopkins but also for those concerned with the subject of Christianity and sexuality. It is a first-rate contribution to the whole subject of the theology of the body." —James Finn Cotter, author of Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Purchase from Anthem Press. 

Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter

By Karen Dieleman 

Religious Imaginaries explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. It rethinks ideas that Victorian women’s faith commitments tend to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry.

Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, the author explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences.

ISBN:  9780821420171

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Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

George Meredith, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

Anniversary edition edited by Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford

Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside occupies a distinctive and somewhat notorious place within George Meredith’s already unique body of work. Modern Love is now best known for the emotionally intense sonnet cycle which Meredith’s own contemporaries dismissed as scandalously confessional and indiscreet. While individual sonnets from the work have been anthologized, the complete cycle is rarely included, and the original edition has not been reprinted since its first appearance in 1862. This edition restores the original publication and supplements it with a range of accompanying materials that will reintroduce Meredith’s astonishing collection of poetry to a new generation of readers.

“This complex, avant-garde Victorian poet comes into his own in this outstanding edition. Meredith's provocative experiments, prismatic ironies and shifting perspectives dazzle anew here, with the poems published alongside ‘Modern Love,’ plus contemporary reviews, cultural documents of poetics, sexuality and the sensoria.”—Isobel Armstrong, University of London

"One hundred fifty years have passed since George Meredith’s extraordinarily bold ‘Modern Love’ struck Richard Holt Hutton in the Spectator as nothing less than ‘Modern Lust.’ In this finely prepared edition, Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford draw detailed attention to one of Victorian Britain’s greatest poems on sexual desire. This outstanding edition enables us to see why Meredith, a unique writer whose formidable demands too often account for his unjustifiable neglect, deserves renewed critical attention.”—Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles

“Rebecca Mitchell and Criscillia Benford’s important edition opens new possibilities in scholarship and classrooms by allowing readers to access Meredith’s vibrant poetry in its cultural, publishing, and visual contexts.”—Linda K. Hughes, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry

Purchase at Yale Press or on Amazon.

ISBN: 978-0300173178

Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century

By Anne Stiles

In the 1860s and 1870s, leading neurologists used animal experimentation to establish that discrete sections of the brain regulate specific mental and physical functions. These discoveries had immediate medical benefits: David Ferrier's detailed cortical maps, for example, saved lives by helping surgeons locate brain tumors and haemorrhages without first opening up the skull. These experiments both incited controversy and stimulated creative thought, because they challenged the possibility of an extra-corporeal soul. This book examines the cultural impact of neurological experiments on late-Victorian Gothic romances by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells and others. Novels like Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde expressed the deep-seated fears and visionary possibilities suggested by cerebral localization research, and offered a corrective to the linearity and objectivity of late Victorian neurology.

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Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel

By Vanessa L. Ryan

In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era.

Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds.

Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

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Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions

John Holmes, editor

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012

Over the last thirty years, more and more critics and scholars have come to recognize the importance of science to literature. Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on what poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of the scientific developments going on around them. In a collection of twelve essays, leading experts on modern poetry and on literature and science explore how poets have used scientific language in their poems, how poetry can offer new perspectives on science, and how the ‘Two Cultures’ can and have come together in the work of poets from Britain and Ireland, America and Australia.

What does the poetry of a leading immunologist and a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist tell us about how poetry can engage with science? Scientific experiments aim to yield knowledge, but what do the linguistic and formal experiments of contemporary American poets suggest about knowledge in their turn? How can universities help to bring these different experimental cultures and practices together? What questions do literary critics need to ask themselves when looking at poems that respond to science? How did developments in biology between the wars shape modernist poetry? What did William Empson make of science fiction, Ezra Pound of the fourth dimension, Thomas Hardy of anthropology? How did modern poets from W. B. Yeats to Elizabeth Bishop and Judith Wright respond to the legacy of Charles Darwin? This book aims to answer these questions and more, in the process setting out the state of the field and suggesting new directions and approaches for research by students and scholars working on the fertile relationship between science and poetry today.

‘This collection genuinely offers new directions for the study of science in modern poetry. It is coherently organised, full of matter, often fascinating, and always thought-provoking.’

Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

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Giving Women: Alliance & Exchange in Victorian Culture

By Jill Rappoport

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. Gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the markets that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women’s personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women’s giving from the 1820s to the First World War. In fiction and poetry by Brontë, Barrett Browning, Gaskell, and Rossetti , periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

Oxford University Press, 2012

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Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

By Rae Greiner

Indiana University

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

This book proposes a new model for understanding the “sympathetic realism” of the nineteenth-century realists. Sympathetic Realism reads fictional works by novelists such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James, as well as philosophical and historical writings by authors such as Jeremy Bentham, in order to demonstrate the ways in which the protocols of sympathetic imagining, developed (especially) by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), are at work in the forms, rather than simply in the contents, of these works. Such a sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others. It provides a way of thinking “along with” them. By abstracting feeling away from its origins, by turning feelings into figures of speech, sympathy enables much more than emotional sharing, for it need not involve feeling at all. Sympathy’s most important contribution is not one-to-one emotional matching but instead a more mundane, more ordinary sense of comfortable, proximate agreement with others, a shared mentality or state of mind. Thus its most profound effect: sympathy produces realism. It is the cognitive process enabling us to experience a world held in common with others, to feel confident that our perceptions are theirs.   

Sympathetic Realism revises standard accounts of sympathy and realism. It considers sympathy as a way of thinking, an imaginative operation. Sympathy is neither an emotion in its own right nor an activity in which feeling necessarily results, but is instead the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated.  Neither sympathy nor the sympathetic realism of the novelists and writers in question stakes a claim on transparency. The sympathetic realism operating in their works functions as a means of provisional understanding, aware that we neither have nor should desire unencumbered access to other minds. Critics who describe realism as a “habit of mind,” and who define nineteenth-century literary realism in particular as an historicizing mode, thus describe what sympathetic realism feels like for readers and for (some) characters alike: as a way of inhabiting the mindsets out of which arise a sense of historical reality, a collective confidence in shared human sentiments and beliefs.  

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Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars

By Julie Codell

This book is a richly illustrated collection of essays on the global media representations of the Delhi Coronation Durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911, with a focus on colonial photography of these monumental events. Authors draw on art history, anthropology, history and geography to analyze the social, political and ideological ways in which photography was deployed to record and enhance these imperial spectacles, and the subtle ways photographs also critiqued and undermined the imperial intentions of these events. The book is part of an innovative series on colonial photography that draws on the vast archives of thousands of colonial photographs of British imperial colonies in the Ebrahim Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (New Delhi).

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Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War

Peter Stansky and William Abrahams

Julian Bell explores the life of a younger member, and sole poet, of the Bloomsbury Group, the most important community of British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century, which includes Virginia Woolf (Julian's aunt), E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry. This biography draws upon the expanding archives on Bloomsbury to present Julian's life more completely and more personally than has been done previously. It is an intense and profound exploration of personal, sexual, intellectual, political, and literary life in England between the two world wars. Through Julian, the book provides important insights on Virginia Woolf, his mother Vanessa Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Taking us from London to China to Spain during its civil war, the book is also the ultimately heartbreaking story of one young man's life.

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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Leah Price

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books’ binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish n’ chips wrap?

Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to waste paper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that can’t be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.

Supplementing close readings with an ethnography of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

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The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M O W Oliphant

Editor: Linda H. Peterson in The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Joanne Shattock and Elisabeth Jay. Pickering & Chatto, 2012.

This new scholarly edition reproduces the original 1899 Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M O W Oliphant, together with entries from her personal diaries for 1887, 1888 and 1896. It includes annotations of the full text, as well as textual variants from the original manuscript and for the second and third editions. The volume is part of a large editorial project on Oliphant’s works. Part I, “Literary Criticism and Literary History,” includes four volumes: Literary Criticism, 1854–69; Literary Criticism, 1870–76; Literary Criticism, 1877–86; and The Victorian Age of English Literature. In addition to the Autobiography, Part II, “Literary Criticism, Autobiography, Biography and Historical Writing,” includes Literary Criticism, 1887–97; Writings on Biography (2 vols.); and Historical Writing. For future volumes, see www.pickeringchatto.com/oliphant.

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Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Sylvia A. Pamboukian

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

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The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Sara L. Maurer

This book connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to the nineteenth-century debates about property that characterized the English occupation of Ireland. Victorian writers on both sides of the Irish Sea were deeply attracted to the idea that the Irish had rights to their land that the state was powerless to give or take away. Analyzing this strain of thought through a century of British and Irish fiction, journalism, and political theory, Maurer suggests that the ownership of Irish land played a major role in how Victorians were able to imagine a political entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Bringing together canonical British novelists—Maria Edgeworth, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith—with the writings of major British political theorists—John Stuart Mill, Henry Sumner Maine, and William Gladstone—Maurer recovers the broad influence of Irish culture on the rest of the British Isles.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide

Michele Martinez

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide introduces new readers and students to a celebrated and controversial Victorian novel-poem. Long extracts from the text are accompanied by fresh biographical and scholarly commentary. The text’s composition history, major influences, and modes of poetic expression are also generously discussed. Martinez guides readers through the poems major themes and contexts, introducing a range of interpretive frameworks. The teaching and bibliographic chapters offer supplementary materials for college or university instruction.

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