To talk about royalty is to talk of many things: privilege, equality, nationality, morality, family life, parenting, divorce, the media and more. Important themes and issues flow through the seemingly trivial everyday chatter about royalty.Now with a new preface, Talking of the Royal Family was the first serious full-length study of royalty to emerge from this rhetorical perspective and remains relevant today.

The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville, and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes, and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of important novelists, and h...

Most people think of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as a distinctly British product. Begun in England 150 years ago, it took more than 60 years to complete and, when it was finally finished in 1928, the British prime minister heralded it as a 'national treasure'. It maintained this image throughout the twentieth century, and in 2006 the English public voted it an 'Icon of England', alongside Marmite, Buckingham Palace and the bowler hat. However, this book shows that the dictionary is...

The nature of childhood, the consideration of whether a certain age denotes innocence or not, and the desire to teach good citizenship to our children are all issues commonly discussed by today's media. This book brings together a variety of perspectives on the study of childhood: how this has been treated historically and how such a concept is developing as we move into the next century.The book is divided into five main sections:* part one sets the scene a...

The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment offers a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century movement that has been profoundly influential on western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in fields including philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. In addition, the contributors relate the Scottish Enlig...

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the ...

The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially commissioned essays reflecting the current state of research in each particular field. Covering topics from music to politics, art to technology, war to domestic arts, journalism to science, the essays address multiple aspects of the Victoria...

Within the last ten years there has been a renaissance in Irish drama from both sides of the border, including award-winning work which has transfered to London and New York, and has toured Britain as well as Europe and Australia. This book explores the dynamics of the relationship between these representations of Ireland and the fluid nature of cultural identity, especially during a period of economic and political change. Although the book establishes the historical context for contempor...

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes inclu...

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 ...

Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inher...

Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ...