Nell has a friend in need but will her kind heart wreck her chance for future happiness? A meddlesome prank and a stray kitten bring Helen and Gabriel together but will he be able to admit his feelings? When Lily goes missing will Archibald trust his wife or listen to the ‘evidence’ of family friends? Is Marie’s runaway kookaburra the last straw or the answer to her problems? Will Teresa’s faith in the Madonna bring her beloved Carlo home safely from the coral fishing?Catherine Mar...

Christmas in fiction – a time when families reunite and love blossoms, when evil is overcome and tragedy is averted. Cruelty and revenge are offset by heroism and forgiveness, and constancy in love is rewarded. But in Australia Christmas stories are also marked by fire and flood, cyclone and drought, and the perils of isolation. Cattle drovers find themselves stuck in a gumtree, a pitiless squatter learns the cost of cruelty, and love’s ‘cooee’ is heard as far away as London. All the drama...

Tom Morison is a reluctant freeholder in South Australia and unsuited to farming. But Tom is redeemed when his education in geology and chemistry finally gives the family their best Christmas ever – a ‘golden’ one. In this and eight other ‘lost’ stories of goldmining in colonial-era Australia, a colourful cast of characters star in stories of love and crime, loyalty and betrayal, spirituality and avarice. And the eternal lure of gold and its corrupting influence are ever-present.As...

This collection provides the first comprehensive account of eResearch and the new empiricism as they are transforming the field of Australian literary studies in the twenty-first century. These effects are especially evident in the exponential expansion of the online research environment, the rise of book history, print culture studies, the history of reading and publishing, and in the resulting transformation of Australian literary criticism and history.The essays range from accou...

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters-heroes and villains-as in envisioning their female protagonists, but this fact has received very little scholarly attention to date. In Women Constructing Men, scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and the United States begin to sketch the outline of a new literary history of women writing men in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century until today. ...

"A feminist classic."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review“A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again.”—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book WorldA pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women ...

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer cul...

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work ...

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...

First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency.Illuminating with uncanny...

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...

In the last few decades Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. The essays in this Companion draw on recent advances in biographical and bibliographical studies of Gaskell and cover the range of her impressive and varied output as a writer of nov...