The development of new sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century. The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for equality have become a major concern in both fields. The legacy of this process has its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century.The Victorian preoccupation about the female body and sexual promiscuity was f...

First published in 1986. Independent Spirits is about the intellectual world of the humbly-born in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, focussing on plebeian, or working- and lower middle-class spiritualists. This book is an important study which throws light on the idealism and search for knowledge that were so central in plebeian circles and in certain, very important parts of the labour movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This title wi...

Is Western civilisation based on a mistaken understanding of humanity? Fundemental to any society is its comprehension of human nature. It shapes attitudes and policies on a whole range of issues: interpersonal relations, child-rearing, discipline and punishment, economics and welfare.The outcome of egalitarian aims or methods has often missed its mark: e.g.,in education it has led to the dumbing down of academic standards, grade inflation and a decline in social mobility. Egalitar...

Arthur Koestler's publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests. The Trail of the Dinosaur gathers some of his best-known essays and speeches.The Trail of the Dinosaur , first published in 1955, contains a great deal of Koestler's thinking for the first ten years after the war – a 'farewell to arms' as he wrote in his preface. These essays deal with the political questions that obsessed him for the best part of a quarter of a century.

In the 1600s, European travellers discovered Indian vegetarianism. Western culture was changed forever…When early travellers returned from India with news of the country’s vegetarians, they triggered a crisis in the European conscience. This panoramic tale recounts the explosive results of an enduring cultural exchange between East and West and tells of puritanical insurgents, Hinduphiles, scientists and philosophers who embraced a radical agenda of reform. These visionaries dissen...

One of our most brilliant minds offers a sweeping intellectual history that argues for the reclamation of culture’s valueCulture is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. Defining culture and pinpointing its role in our lives is not, however, so straightforward. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics, is uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In this keenly analytical and acerbically funny book, he explores how culture and our...

The present-day Republic of Ireland was created by a revolutionary elite which developed between 1858 and 1914. Here, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, Professor Tom Garvin, considers the social origins of the revolutionary politicians who became the rulers of Ireland after the 1916 Rising and examines their political preconceptions, ideologies and prejudices. In many cases they were not only influenced by old agrarian grievances and memories of the Great Irish Famine, but also, an...

The Victorians had a thirst for knowledge. This drove them to explore the unchartered corners of the world, plumb the unfathomable depths of science, discover evolution and create some of the engineering and architectural marvels of the world. Yet this open-mindedness also at times made them utterly gullible. Because of their closeness to disease and the ever-present threat of their own mortality, it was inevitable that they would be open to the claims of quacks who promis...

Victoria's Madmen is the story of those who were outcasts by temperament and choice; the non-conformists of the Victorian Age. Clive Bloom's readable account of the dark underbelly of Victoria's Britain captures the unrest bubbling under the surface of strait-laced Victorian society.

The meaning of our concern for mortal remains—from antiquity through the twentieth centuryThe Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remain...

Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When V estiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scienti...

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...