Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockney...

From the award-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter,a witty and academic illumination of daily domestic life in Georgian England.In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist ...

Romanticism is where the modern age begins, and Hazlitt was its most articulate spokesman. No one else had the ability to see it whole; no one else knew so many of its politicians, poets, and philosophers. By interpreting it for his contemporaries, he speaks to us of ourselves - of the culture and world we now inhabit. Perhaps the most important development of his time, the creation of a mass media, is one that now dominates our lives. Hazlitt's livelihoo was dependent on it. As the biogra...

The extraordinary works of the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have entranced and challenged scholars, students, and general readers for the past 150 years. This Companion offers a fascinating introduction to those works, including two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century - Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. In a series of original essays, contributors explore the roots of the sisters' achievement in early nineteenth-century Haworth, and the chi...

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age,...

The nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion in the reading public and an explosive growth in the number of books and newspapers produced to meet its demands. These specially commissioned essays examine not only the full range and variety of texts that entertained and informed the Victorians, but also the boundaries of Victorian literature: the links and overlap with Romanticism in the 1830s, and the roots of modernism in the years leading up to the First World War. The Compani...

The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville, and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes, and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of important novelists, and h...

Literary biography is an endlessly fascinating form, not least because of the fierce controversies that attend the question of how much of a writer's real life ought to be related to readers. Ian Hamilton, a first-rate biographer who encountering his share of adversity in writing the life of J.D. Salinger, is the perfect chronicler of such controversies in this brilliant study, first published in 1992, which charts the course of literary biography from Donne and Shakespeare to Plath and La...

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes inclu...

Frances Burney (1752–1840) was the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century. Her first novel Evelina was a publishing sensation; her follow-up novels Cecilia and Camilla were regarded as among the best fiction of the time and were much admired by Jane Austen. Burney's life was equally remarkable: a protegee of Samuel Johnson, lady-in-waiting at the court of George III, later wife of an emigre aristocrat and stranded in France during the Napoleonic Wars, she lived on into t...

The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially commissioned essays reflecting the current state of research in each particular field. Covering topics from music to politics, art to technology, war to domestic arts, journalism to science, the essays address multiple aspects of the Victoria...

He proclaimed himself a genius and raged against the slightest criticism from fellow scholars; he was a Marxist who despised the 'Idiot People'; he could be generous and affectionate yet hurled insults at his friends; he inveighed against Puritanism but was himself in many ways a Puritan: A. L. Rowse was a man of many contradictions.In this clear-sighted and absorbing biography, Richard Ollard examines the many sides of Rowse's Protean personality to reveal a man who, whatever he w...