Dr Essaka Joshua's Books

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

By: Dr Essaka Joshua

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The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

By: Dr Essaka Joshua

This important contribution to both Romantic and cultural studies situates literature by Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, Clare, and Blake within the context of folklore and popular customs associated with May Day. Romantic responses to May Day bring into focus a range of issues now regarded as central to the writing of the period – the natural world, city life, the pastoral, regional and national identities, popular culture, cultural degeneration, and cultural difference. Essaka Joshua explores new connections between these issues in the context of a set of heterogeneous cultural practices that are rooted in the traditions and activities of diverse social groups. She shows how Romantic writers have positioned themselves in relation to what has become known as the public sphere, and the way in which they articulate an understanding of the common sphere as a site of plebeian self-expression. Joshua's nuanced account acknowledges the full complexity of class formations and inter-class relationships and permits noncanonical and canonical texts such as the Prelude, Songs of Innocence and Experience, and 'The Village Minstrel' to be reinterpreted in a cultural context that has not been previously explored by literary critics.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

140948999X

ISBN 13

9781409489993

John Clare's Religion

By: Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker

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John Clare's Religion

By: Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker

Addressing a neglected aspect of John Clare's history, Sarah Houghton-Walker explores Clare's poetry within the framework of his faith and the religious context in which he lived. While Clare expressed affection for the Established Church and other denominations on various occasions, Houghton-Walker brings together a vast array of evidence to show that any exploration of Clare's religious faith must go beyond pulpit and chapel. Phenomena that Clare himself defines as elements of faith include ghosts, witches, and literature, as well as concepts such as selfhood, Eden, eternity, childhood, and evil. Together with more traditional religious expressions, these apparently disparate features of Clare's spirituality are revealed to be of fundamental significance to his poetry, and it becomes evident that Clare's experiences can tell us much about the experience of 'religion', 'faith', and 'belief' in the period more generally. A distinguishing characteristic of Houghton-Walker's approach is her conviction that one must take into account all aspects of Clare's faith or else risk misrepresenting it. Her book thus engages not only with the facts of Clare's religious habits but also with the ways in which he was literally inspired, and with how that inspiration is connected to his intimations of divinity, to his vision of nature, and thus to his poetry. Belief, mediated through the idea of vision, is found to be implicated in Clare's experiences and interpretations of the natural world and is thus shown to be critical to the content of his verse.

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Page Count

272

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409475174

ISBN 13

9781409475170

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

By: Dr Maureen McCue

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British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

By: Dr Maureen McCue

Offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian Old Master art by early nineteenth-century writers, McCue illuminates the important role these artworks played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism. She argues that they informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities.

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Page Count

209

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409468321

ISBN 13

9781409468325

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

By: Dr Jennifer Camden

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Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

By: Dr Jennifer Camden

Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of female characters who, while embodying the qualities associated with heroines, fail to achieve this status in the story. These "secondary heroines," often the friend or sister of the primary heroine, typically disappear from the action of the novel as the courtship plot progresses, only to return near the conclusion of the action with renewed demands on the reader's attention. Accounting for this persistent pattern, Camden suggests, reveals the cultural work performed by these unusual figures in the early history of the novel. Because she is often a far more vivid character than the heroine of the marriage plot, the secondary heroine inevitably engages the reader's interest in her plight. That the narrative apparently seeks to suppress her creates tension and points to the secondary heroine as a site of contested identity who represents an ideology of womanhood and nationhood at odds with the national ideals represented by the primary heroine, whom the reader is asked to embrace. In showing how the anxiety produced by these ideals is displaced onto the secondary heroine, Camden's study represents an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.

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Page Count

194

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409475743

ISBN 13

9781409475743

Frederic Leighton

Death, Mortality, Resurrection

By: Dr Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

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Frederic Leighton

Death, Mortality, Resurrection

By: Dr Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Offering a timely reexamination of the late Victorian period’s most institutionally powerful artist, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag undertakes close readings of Frederic Lord Leighton’s paintings, sculptures, frescos and drawings, and situates them in the context of contemporaneous debates about death and resurrection in theology, archaeology and medicine. The author reconfigures what it meant to be not just a late-Victorian neoclassicist and royal academician, but President of the Victorian Royal Academy.

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Page Count

265

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472414357

ISBN 13

9781472414359

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

By: Dr Jason Marc Harris

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Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

By: Dr Jason Marc Harris

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409489906

ISBN 13

9781409489900

Book's by Dr Essaka Joshua

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

The Romantics and the May Day Tradition

John Clare's Religion

John Clare's Religion

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

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