Providing a collection of E.S. Dallas's work, this volume explores the significance of the Scottish writer’s practical and theoretical contributions to both the criticism and journalism of the mid-nineteenth century, as well as offering an edited selection of Dallas’s writings in the Victorian press. This book provides a comprehensive listing of around 250 contributions to other periodicals, and again offer a generous edited selection of around 40 articles that are representative of this b...

This volume comprises of a substantial selection of E.S. Dallas’s journalism in The Times. Although his reviews were crucial not only in forging the literary reputations of upcoming writers such as different as George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, but also in recalibrating the response to well-established authors such as Tennyson and Dickens, Eneas Sweetland Dallas (1827-79) remains arguably the most unjustly neglected of mid-Victorian critics. Although Dallas wrote for many other peri...

Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Woman in White, which inaugurated the sensation novel in the 1860s, and The Moonstone, one of the first detective novels; but he wrote over 20 novels, plays and short stories during a career that spanned four decades. This Companion offers a fascinating overview of Collins's writing. In a wide range of essays by leading scholars, it traces the development of his career, his position as a ...

Valeria Woodville's first act as a married woman is to sign her name in the marriage register incorrectly, and this slip is followed by the gradual disclosure of a series of secrets about her husband's earlier life, each of which leads on to another set of questions and enigmas. Her discoveries prompt her to defy her husband's authority, to take the law into into a labyrinthine maze of false clues and deceptive identities, in which the exploration of the tangled workings of the mind become...

First published in 2005, this collection of essays brings together British, European and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests to demonstrate the range of contemporary perspectives through which George Gissing’s fiction can be viewed. It offers both closely contextualised historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments and engages with a number of themes including: the cultural and social formation of class an...

The American Civil War was the first military conflict in history to be fought with railroads moving troops and the telegraph connecting civilian leadership to commanders in the field. New developments arose at a moment’s notice. As a result, the young nation’s political structure and culture often struggled to keep up. When war began, Congress was not even in session. By the time it met, the government had mobilized over 100,000 soldiers, battles had been fought, casualties had been taken...

The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.In Essential...

Postmodernism has become the orthodoxy in educational theory. It heralds the end of grand theories like Marxism and liberalism, scorning any notion of a united feminist challenge to patriachy, of united anti-racist struggle, and of united working-class movements against capitalist exploitation and oppression. For postmodernists, the world is fragmented, history is ended, and all struggles are local and particularistic. Written by internationally renowned British and American educational th...

This short essay argues that "big government" begins in America's earliest days-- despite our founding myth of small government and limited federal activity. The essay addresses the federal government's indispensable role in land acquisition, its regulation of the fur trade, and its role in managing defense, trade, and social policies. Complementing a wave of new scholarship, "How Big Government Won the West" offers a brief and compelling look at governance in the republic's first century....

Until recently, struggles for justice proceeded against the background of a taken-for-granted frame: the bounded territorial state. With that "Westphalian" picture of political space assumed by default, the scope of justice was rarely subject to open dispute. Today, however, human-rights activists and international feminists join critics of structural adjustment and the World Trade Organization in challenging the view that justice can only be a domestic relation among fellow citizens. Targ...

During Virginia Woolf's lifetime Britain's position in the world changed, and so did the outlook of its people. The Boer War and the First World War forced politicians and citizens alike to ask how far the power of the state extended into the lives of individuals; the rise of fascism provided one menacing answer. Woolf's experiments in fiction, and her unique position in the publishing world, allowed her to address such intersections of the public and the private. Michael H. Whitworth show...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office.Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office.Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds...