Product Description: The Doctor's Wife

Product Description: In a literary career spanning over forty years, Wilkie Collins wrote over twenty novels, several plays, and numerous short stories. However, he is mainly remembered for his best-selling sensation novel The Woman in White. Irregular liasons, the chaotic state of the marriage laws, social and psychological identity, and the interconnections between respectable society and the world of crime are recurring themes in Collins's fiction...read more

Product Description: The novels of May Sinclair make waste paper of most of the fiction of a season. -- The Literary Digest

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This selection of eleven essays charts the most important aspects of the developing debate about Wilkie Collins' fiction in the last twenty years. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches--including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms--these essays examine Collins' fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics). They focus on an author preoccupied with the production of social and psychological identity, and with issues of class, gender and power. If there is a single issue which permeates this collection, it is the question of the subversiveness of Collins' fiction or, alternatively, its retreat from and/or containment of a radical social critique or subversive impulses. The pros and cons of this debate are explored further in Lyn Pykett's detailed and wide-ranging introduction.

Product Description: The fin de siècle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siècle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society...read more

Product Description: Focusing on the works of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood and Rhoda Broughton, Professor Lynn Pykett uses feminist literary history and theory and a cultural studies approach to show how the developments of the last twenty years or so have enabled the sensation novel of the 1860s to be re-viewed as a genre...read more

Product Description: Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? This question is the mainspring of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She offers a re-examination of the dawning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in certain 19th-century discourses: discourses about women, discourses about gender, and other discourses that are organized in gendered terms...read more

Emily Bront%'s writings explore, expand, and transgress limited nineteenth-century ideas of the nature of the female lot and of women's creativity. This study offers an extensive rereading of the poems which focuses on Emily Bront%'s problematic relationship to the Romantic tradition in which they were produced, and to the critical tradition in which they have been reproduced. Using recent feminist work on gender and genre Lyn Pykett throws fresh light on the complexities of Wuthering Heights, and suggests that much of this novel's distinctiveness may be attributed to the particular ways in which it both combines and explores Female Gothic and the emerging realist domestic novel, a genre also widely used and read by women. Contents: Emily Bront%: A Life Hidden from History; The Writings of Ellis Bell; 'Not at all like the poetry women generally write' Emily Bront% and the Problem of the Woman Poet; Death Dreams and Prison Songs; Gender and Genre in^R Wuthering Heights; Changing the Names: The Two Catherines; Nelly Dean: Memoirs of a Survivor; The Male Part of the Poem; Reading Women's Writing: Emily Bront% and the Critics