Aurora Leigh is the foremost example of the mid-nineteenth-century poem of contemporary life. This verse-novel is a richly detailed representation of the early Victorian age. The social panorama extends from the slums of London, through the literary world, to the upper classes and a number of superb satiric portraits: an aunt with rigidly conventional notions of female education; Romney Leigh, the Christian socialist; Lord Howe, the amateur radical; Sir Blaise Delorme, the ostenta...

This edition is the first to present the text as it originally appeared, indicating the changes Carlyle made to later editions. Appendices contain Carlyle's own extensive commentaries on his work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert int...

The Victorian poetry of sexual love between men and women has not been as fully studied as other components of the imaginative literature of the period, and some of the attention it has received has been more concerned with the society and ideology of the age than with the poetry or the love. This study attempts an integrated account of the three elements, with particular emphasis on the close reading of poems. Chapters are devoted to the distinguishing features of Victorian love poetry; B...

First published in 1984. Although Middlemarch was extravagantly praised by Henry James, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf, it is only in the last few decades that the novel has been widely recognised as George Eliot’s finest work, one of the greatest English novels, and one of the classic texts of nineteenth-century fiction.The intellectual, religious and aesthetic background to Middlemarch are fully examined, with particular attention paid to Eliot’s key doctrin...

Kerry McSweeney critiques such readings of Romantic, Victorian, and 19th-century American poems. In What's the Import? he proposes and exemplifies an aesthetic or intrinsic critical model rooted in literary-historical contextualization that considers the determination of meanings to be only one of the qualities that full engagement with a poem requires. His wide-ranging study discusses poems by Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Carroll, Dante and Christina Rossetti...

Now in its fourth edition, Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the exciting and diverse world of poetry. Jeffrey Wainwright’s accessible introduction demystifies poetic forms and traditions, which can at first seem bewildering.Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Dylan Thomas, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain pleasure from poetry. This comprehensive guide e...

Victorian poetry was read and enjoyed by a much larger audience than is sometimes thought. Publication in widely-circulating periodicals, reprinting in book reviews, and excerpting in novels and essays ensured that major poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Rossetti were household names, and they remain popular today. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry provides an accessible overview of British poetry from 1830 to 1901, paying particular attention to its role in mass med...

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements--'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', '...

The dramatic monologue is traditionally associated with Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and is generally considered to have disappeared with the onset of modernism in the twentieth century. Glennis Byron unravels its history and argues that, contrary to belief, the monologue remains popular to this day. This far-reaching and neatly structured volume:* explores the origins of the monologue and presents a history of definitions of the term* conside...

In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare’s influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely q...

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture; the relation of his poetry to the visual arts; the critical traditions and theoretical contexts within which Keats's life and achievements have been assessed. These specially commissioned essays examine Keats's specific poetic endeavours, his striking way with language, and h...

In "Hard Times", Dickens illustrates the condition of England through his depiction of the fictional northern city of Coketown. Among its inhabitants are Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian headmaster who attempts to impose his rigid worldview on his family circle, and the uncaring businessman Mr Bounderby. Their materialist philosophies, as opposed to the world of 'fancy', or imagination, are tested throughout the novel, which also explores workers' conditions in factories, trade unions and...