Product Description: The imagery of brains and nerves that Thomas Hardy employed in over a half century of writing amply demonstrates that he knew the psychology of his time. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination reevaluates Hardy’s representations of minds, the will, and consciousness (and nescience) in the context of Victorian brain science and Victorian medical neurology...read more

Drawing on recent work in critical theory, feminism, and social history, this book explains the relationship between the novel and the emergent commodity culture of Victorian England, using the image of the "display window". Novels Behind Glass analyzes the work of Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Gaskell, to demonstrate that the Victorian novel provides us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect our beliefs about gender, community, and individual identity. It will be of interest to students of Victorian literature and history as well as social and cultural theory.

Book Description: In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating “invisibly” in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative...read more

Product Description: This work analyzes the various aspects of Q.D. Leavis' dealings with novelists such as Jane Austen, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot. It comments on plot, characterization, style, and the Zeitgeist. The final chapters examine the nature of her collaboration with her husband F...read more

This book presents Jane Austen as a radical innovator. It explores the nature of her confrontation with the popular novelists of her time, and demonstrates how her challenge to them transformed fiction. Mary Waldron shows how Austen's novels exemplify the strong skepticism about contemporary notions of the proper content and purpose of fiction that is evident from family letters and other sources. In thus identifying her literary motivation, this book offers a fresh and unifying critique of the novels. (view table of contents)

In this vigorous response to recent trends in theory and criticism, David H. Richter asks how we can again learn to practice literary history. Despite the watchword "always historicize," comparatively few monographs attempt genuine historical explanations of literary phenomena. Richter theorizes that the contemporary evasion of history may stem from our sense that the modern literary ideas underlying our historical explanations-Marxism, formalism, and reception theory-are unable, by themselves, to inscribe an adequate narrative of the origins, development, and decline of genres and style systems. Using the first heyday of the Gothic novel as the prime object of study, Richter develops his pluralistic vision of literary history in practice. Successive chapters outline first a neo-Marxist history of the Gothic; next, a narrative on the Gothic as an institutional form; and finally a study of the reception of the Gothic-the way the romance was sustained by, and in its turn altered, the motives for literary response in the British public around the turn of the nineteenth century. In his concluding chapter, Richter returns to the question of theory, to general issues of adequacy and explanatory power in literary history, to the false panaceas of Foucauldian new historicism and cultural studies, and to the necessity of historical pluralism. A learned, engaging, and important book, The Progress of Romance is essential reading for scholars of British literature, narrative, narrative theory, the novel, and the theory of the novel. David H. Richter is professor of English at Queens College and at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. He is also director of graduate studies at Queens College, where he has taught eighteenth-century studies and literary theory since 1970. Richter is the author of Fable's End and the editor of several books, including Falling into Theory, Narrative/Theory, and The Critical Tradition.

Product Description: When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared anonymously in 1853 the Saturday Review pictured its author, George Eliot, as a bearded Cambridge clergyman and the revered father of several children. When Anthony Trollope published Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel anonymously in 1867, the London Review argued that the internal evidence required the author to be female...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Reverse Tradition invites the reader of postmodern fiction to travel back to the nineteenth-century novel without pretending to let go of contemporary anxieties and expectations. What happens to the reader of Beckett when he or she returns to Melville? Or to the enthusiast of Toni Morrison who rereads Charlotte Bronte? While Robert Kiely does not claim that all fictions begin to look alike, he finds unexpected and illuminating pleasures in examining a variety of ways in which new texts reflect on old...read more