Product Description: From Robinson Crusoe’s cave to Henry Selwyn’s hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today―noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past―Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years...read more

Product Description: CALLING OSCAR WILDE'S philosophy of art his "most elusive legacy," Brown attempts to define Wilde's conception of what art is and what it is not, of what the experience of art means in the modern world, and of the contradictory relations between the work of art and the sphere of everyday ethics...read more

Provides background information on the church, the class system, the aristocracy, education, government, marriage, and other Victorian institions and mores, by way of assisting readers in understanding the richness of Victorian novels

Analyzes Austen's novels in terms of their structure, ironic comedy, satiric realism, and their perception of the cultural significance of marriage