Carolyn Oulton recovers the strategies nineteenth-century authors used to justify the ideal of same-sex romantic friendship and the anxieties these strategies reveal. Informed by recent insights into the erotic potential of such relationships, but focused on romantic friendship as an independent and fully formulated ideal, Oulton departs from other critics who view romantic friendship as either nebulous and culturally naive or an invocation of homoerotic responsiveness. By considering both male and female friendships, Oulton uncovers surprising parallels between them in novels and poetry by authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Disraeli, Charlotte Brontë, and Braddon. Oulton also examines conduct manuals, periodicals, and religious treatises, tracing developments from mid-century to the fin de siècle, when romantic friendship first came under serious attack. Her book is a persuasive challenge to those who view mid-Victorian England, existing in a state of blissful pre-Freudian innocence, as unproblematically accommodating of passionate same-sex relationships.
This study explores the ways in which Dickens’s published work and his thousands of letters intersect, to shape and promote particular myths of the reading experience, as well as redefining the status of the writer. It shows that the boundaries between private and public writing are subject to constant disruption and readjustment, as recipients of letters are asked to see themselves as privileged readers of coded text or to appropriate novels as personal letters to themselves. Imaginative hierarchies are both questioned and ultimately reinforced, as prefaces and letters function to create a mythical reader who is placed in imaginative communion with the writer of the text. But the written word itself becomes increasingly unstable, through its association in the later novels with evasion, fraud and even murder.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) was the author of Three Men in a Boat, one of the best-loved books in the English language, but much of his prolific career has been left unexplored. Over a period of forty years, Jerome was variously a humourist, novelist, journalist, essayist and dramatist, leaving behind him a prodigious quantity of work, belying his famous quote "I like work. It fascinates me. I could sit and look at it for hours." In this major new biography, Carolyn Oulton unearths hitherto unknown details of Jerome's early life in Walsall with his Micawberish father and God-fearing mother, and follows his momentous move to the Fairy City of London, where a formative encounter with Charles Dickens influenced his choice of profession. Although famous for his unerring ability to capture middle-class experience in comic form, Oulton also reveals Jerome's serious side as campaigner on animal rights, champion of the underdog, and fierce opponent of the New Woman. Jerome was desperate to shake off the persistent association with larking about on the Thames, but never quite achieved it in his own lifetime. Jerome K. Jerome is revealed in Oulton's book as a complex figure worthy of reassessment, with his contradictions, idiosyncrasies and, above all, his exquisite wit. This edition also includes a Foreword by Jeremy Nicholas, President of the Jerome K. Jerome Society.
This book places Dickens and Wilkie Collins against such important figures as John Henry Newman and George Eliot in seeking to recover their response to the religious controversies of mid-nineteenth century England. While much recent criticism has tended to overlook or dismiss their religious pronouncements, this book foregrounds the religious aspect of their writing and relocates their most important work in the context of contemporary debate. The response of both writers is seen to be complex and fraught with tension.
Giving a comprehensive critique of Cholmondeley's writings, Oulton analyzes the inspiration and influences behind some of her greatest work and provides an appealing biography on a writer whose work is of increasing interest to modern scholars.
Poetry is ecstatic speech. It is intended to be spoken aloud, not simply read silently from the page. D.H. Lawrence's poetry is ecstatic in nature, particularly his poems which are concerned with issues of human wholeness. The Author's vision for writing this book has been simply to introduce some of D.H. Lawrence's magnificent poems in such a way that others might come to love and appreciate them as deeply as he does. People from every gender and walk of life can find enjoyment and inspiration from Lawrence's poetry in "Hunger For Wholeness".
Contains three early examples of the genre of New Woman writing, each portraying women in ways wholly different to those which had gone before. This title includes "Kith and Kin" (1881), "Miss Brown" and "The Wing of Azrael".
The novels in this collection include one by a fierce opponent to the New Woman movement, as well as two from women whose work can be seen as archetypal New Woman fiction.
The novels in this collection include one by a fierce opponent to the New Woman movement, as well as two from women whose work can be seen as archetypal New Woman fiction.
In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period’s complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading’ as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.
Contains three early examples of the genre of New Woman writing, each portraying women in ways wholly different to those which had gone before. This title includes "Kith and Kin" (1881), "Miss Brown" and "The Wing of Azrael".
Contains three early examples of the genre of New Woman writing, each portraying women in ways wholly different to those which had gone before. This title includes "Kith and Kin" (1881), "Miss Brown" and "The Wing of Azrael".
Covers four texts from the 1890s that helped to crystallize the idea of the 'New Woman' during a period where the role of women was increasingly debated and challenged, not least due to the growth of the suffrage movement.
Covers four texts from the 1890s that helped to crystallize the idea of the 'New Woman' during a period where the role of women was increasingly debated and challenged, not least due to the growth of the suffrage movement.
Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.
Covers four texts from the 1890s that helped to crystallize the idea of the 'New Woman' during a period where the role of women was increasingly debated and challenged, not least due to the growth of the suffrage movement.
The novels in this collection include one by a fierce opponent to the New Woman movement, as well as two from women whose work can be seen as archetypal New Woman fiction.
The novels in this collection include one by a fierce opponent to the New Woman movement, as well as two from women whose work can be seen as archetypal New Woman fiction.
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