Product Description: How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy...read more

Product Description: FORTHCOMING FROM SUNY UNIVERSITY PRESS ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2014

Product Description: Just off busy Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road in Delhi, India, the 16th century Sufi court poet Jamali is buried in a tomb next to Kamali, whom helpful guides say, according to oral tradition, was the poet's lover. Little about them is known...read more

Product Description: Karen Chase examines old age as it was constructed in Victorian social and literary cultures. Beginning with the vexed relation between elderly people whose numbers and needs taxed the state which sought to identify, classify, and provide for them, she analyzes illuminating moments in narrative form, social policy, or cultural attitudes...read more

Product Description: For more than a decade, Karen Chase taught poetry writing to severely incapacitated patients at a large psychiatric hospital outside of New York City. During that time, she began working with Ben, a handsome, formerly popular and athletic young man who had given up speaking and had withdrawn from social interaction...read more

Product Description: Middlemarch is the prime example of George Eliot's dictum that "interpretations are illimitable," and in this collection of new essays Middlemarch is re-examined as an open text responsive to gaps and fissures, and as resistant to authority as it is to other fixed notions of identity, idealism, and gender...read more

Product Description: A collection of power and humor in earthy eroticism, invoking both the fever and hope in wakeful dreams. A bold work of the elegiac past and the visceral present converging in provocative imagery. There is often an undercurrent of longing in Chase’s poems—the longing of hunger, of sex, of unfinished business with the dead...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.

Product Description: A comprehensive introduction to Middlemarch, offering both general information and an original interpretation. It pays considerable attention to the intellectual and social context surrounding Middlemarch, and situates the work within nineteenth-century traditions of the novel in England and Europe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A comprehensive introduction to Middlemarch, offering both general information and an original interpretation. It pays considerable attention to the intellectual and social context surrounding Middlemarch, and situates the work within nineteenth-century traditions of the novel in England and Europe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)