Sinclair Lewis' scandalous tale of Una Golden, who dared to work, marry, divorce and find success in the male-dominated society of New York in the early 1900s.Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and a writer lauded both for his craft and his principles, wrote The Job as a statement of female empowerment, and self-determination over societal expectation. Written in the early years of the 1900s Lewis' central character, ...

Who do you think you are? In Subjectivity, Ruth Robbins explores some of the responses to this fundamental question. In readings of a number of autobiographical texts from the last three centuries, Robbins offers an approachable account of formations of the self which demonstrates that both psychology and material conditions - often in tension with one another - are the building blocks of modern notions of selfhood. Key texts studied include:- William Wordsworth's Prelu...

Was the late nineteenth century 'Victorian' or 'modern'? Why did the New Woman disappear from literary history? Where did T. S. Eliot's poetics of the city come from?In this essential guide, Ruth Robbins explores an era often named an 'age of transition' which exists uneasily between the apparent certainties of the Victorians and the advent of a Modernist aesthetics of instability. Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period (decadence, realis...

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion provides readers with close textual analyses regarding the role of subversive acts or tendencies in Victorian literature. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the works under review—including such canonical texts as Dracula, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes—the critics in this anthology offer groundbreaking studies of subversion as a literary motif.For some late nineteenth-century British nove...

This book provides students with lucid and authoritative definitions of some of the most significant terms and concepts employed in the study of literary theory. It offers 250 terms from many areas of literary theory, including cultural studies, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, Marxist and feminist studies, postcolonialism, and other areas of identity politics. In addition, it provides definitions of principal areas of literary study, and a chronological chart of major critics and philos...

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

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 Thack...

Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, ...

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy.Delving into an enormo...

Sir Frank Kermode is acknowledged as one of the greatest critics of our time, renowned for the wit humanity and good sense of his writing. Pleasing Myself brings together the very best of his shorter pieces, on topics ranging from Donne and Yeats to modern art and money.

In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel has been updated fully, taking account of new resear...