British Literature - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925

Sat, 15 Oct 2011

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 (2011)

By Martin Hipsky

Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.

Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both “low modern” and “high modernist” British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Rebecca West, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Modernism+and+the+Women%E2%80%99s+Popular+Romance+in+Britain%2C+1885%E2%80%931925.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913

Fri, 15 Jul 2011

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 (2011)
A Critical Anthology

Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh. The anthology brings together poets who were in fact colleagues, competitors, and influences on each other. The historical scope of the anthology, beginning with the famous Orientalist Sir William Jones and the anonymous “Anna Maria” and ending with Indian poets publishing in fin-de-siècle London, will enable teachers and students to understand what brought Kipling early fame and why at the same time Tagore’s Gitanjali became a global phenomenon. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 puts all parties to the poetic conversation back together and makes their work accessible to American audiences.

With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection will significantly reshape the understanding of English language literary culture in India. It allows scholars to experience the diversity of poetic forms created in this period and to understand the complex religious, cultural, political, and gendered divides that shaped them.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Anglophone+Poetry+in+Colonial+India%2C+1780%E2%80%931913.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Amy Levy

Tue, 06 Apr 2010

Amy Levy (2010)
Critical Essays

Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman

Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.

Amy Levy: Critical Essays brings together scholars working in the fields of Victorian cultural history, women’s poetry and fiction, and the history of Anglo-Jewry. The essays trace the social, intellectual, and political contexts of Levy’s writing and its contemporary reception. Working from close analyses of Levy’s texts, the collection aims to rethink her engagement with Jewish identity, to consider her literary and political identifications, to assess her representations of modern consumer society and popular culture, and to place her life and work within late-Victorian cultural debate.

This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students offering both a comprehensive literature review of scholarship-to-date and a range of new critical perspectives.

Contributors:
Susan David Bernstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Gail Cunningham, Kingston University
Elizabeth F. Evans, Pennslyvania State University–DuBois
Emma Francis, Warwick University
Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University
T. D. Olverson, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Lyssa Randolph, University of Wales, Newport
Meri-Jane Rochelson, Florida International University

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/9780821419052.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

X Marks the Spot

Tue, 30 Mar 2010

X Marks the Spot (2010)
Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895

By Megan A. Norcia

During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.

Cross-disciplinary in nature, X Marks the Spot is an analysis of previously unknown material that examines the interplay between gender, imperial duty, and pedagogy.

Megan A. Norcia offers an alternative map for traversing the landscape of nineteenth-century female history by reintroducing the primers into the dominant historical record. This is the first full-length study of the genre as a distinct tradition of writing produced on the fringes of professional geographic discourse before the high imperial period.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/X+Marks+the+Spot.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV

Sun, 01 Apr 2007

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV (2007)
With Variant Readings and Annotations

Edited by Allan C. Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring and Paul D. L. Turner

In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents. Ranging across eras and cultures, the books here reveal his late thoughts about history, myth, legend, faith, love, and desire. He had never been more popular, and the founding of the Browning Society in 1881 expanded both his audience and his sense of his place in English letters.

The first title in Volume XV is Dramatic Idylls, Second Series (1880). Taking his subjects from classical history, colonial India, Arabian legend, medieval sorcery, Jewish folk tales, and Greek myth, Browning startles the reader with the rapidity of his thought and the inventiveness of his art.

In Jocoseria (1883) Browning's subjects range across time and space from Hebraic legend to the England of the Romantics. Such variety helped attract new readers: Jocoseria was immediately successful, and a second edition was printed in the same year as the first.

Although Browning's next volume, Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), was so popular that three editions were printed in less than two years, this artful string of anecdotes and lyrics has attracted little favorable criticism. The materials—Persian legends and Arabic backgrounds—chimed with the wildly popular Orientalism of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, Whistler's Peacock Room, and Alma-Tadema's paintings. But the thought was pure Browning in his most optimistic vein, and not at all in tune with the growing pessimism of the day.

As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XV.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Bleak Houses

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Bleak Houses (2005)
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

By Lisa Surridge

The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Bleak+Houses.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Fin-de-Siècle Poem

Mon, 01 Aug 2005

The Fin-de-Siècle Poem (2005)
English Literary Culture and the 1890s

Edited by Joseph Bristow

Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief.

The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W. B. Yeats, who dominated the literary scene of the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson.

The Fin-de-Siècle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how women poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Fin-de-Si%C3%A8cle+Poem.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Inaugural Wounds

Wed, 30 Jun 2004

Inaugural Wounds (2004)
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives

By Robert E. Lougy

Desire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want. Desire makes itself known, but disguises its presence—appearing, for example, in unconscious but repetitive, and sometimes even self-destructive, patterns of behavior.

Informed by the voices of Freud and Lacan regarding the nature of language and desire, Inaugural Wounds examines the ways in which five major nineteenth-century English writers explored the trajectories and shapes of desire. Arguing that we need to give to novels the same kind of close scrutiny we give to poetry, author Robert Lougy suggests that when we do so, we discover that they often astound us by the resonance and range of their language, as well as by their ability to take us to strange and haunting places.

The five narratives examined—Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, William Thackeray's Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure—testify to the mysterious origins of desire. Although each of the novels tells its own story in its own way, they share a fascination with the nature of desire itself.

Drawing upon recent work that has challenged historicist approaches toward nineteenth-century British literature, Professor Lougy uses the insights of psychoanalysis to enable us to more fully appreciate the depth and power of these novels. Of great value to Victorian and psychoanalytic scholars, Inaugural Wounds will be useful for teaching undergraduates as well.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Inaugural+Wounds.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Subjects on Display

Fri, 23 Apr 2004

Subjects on Display (2004)
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity

By Beth Newman

Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women. Chief among these is the changing socioeconomic landscape that made the ideal of the modest woman outlive its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority.

This problem cannot be grasped in its full complexity, Newman shows, without considering how the unstable social meanings of display interacted with psychical forces-specifically, the desire to be seen by others that is central to both masculine and feminine subjectivity. This desire raises an issue that feminist theorists have been reluctant to address: the importance of pleasure in being the object of the look. Their reluctance is characteristic of cultural theory, which has tended to equate subjectivity with the position of the observer rather than the observed.

Through a consideration of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Newman shifts the inquiry toward the observed in the experience of being seen. In the process she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.

Subjects on Display will appeal to scholars and students in several disciplines as it returns psychoanalysis to a central position within literary and cultural studies.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Subjects+on+Display.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation

Thu, 01 Jan 2004

Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (2004)

By Julia M. Wright

William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal. Instead, as Julia Wright argues in her award-winning study Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake’s concern lies with the kind of community that is being established. Moreover, writing at the moment of the emergence of modern nationalism, Blake reveals a concern with the national community in particular.

Beginning with a discussion of the priority of national narrative in late-eighteenth-century art theory and antiquarianism, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation traces its relevance in Blake’s printed works, from The Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth Prophecies to The Laocoön. Professor Wright then turns to Europe, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, focusing on Blake’s portrayals of particular characters’ alienation from the groups and ideologies represented in the texts. The book closes by arguing that Blake’s major printed works, Milton and Jerusalem, are explicit and extensive engagements with the question of nation—and empire.

Although nationalism existed in various forms during the Romantic period, Blake’s contemporaries generally assumed that nations should progress continuously, producing a clear narrative line from an auspicious origin to the perfect fulfillment of that promise. Wright argues that these mutually determining constructs of national character and national narrative inform Blake’s handling of the problem of the individual-within-a-community.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Blake%2C+Nationalism%2C+and+the+Politics+of+Alienation.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.