BiblioVault - Books about British Literature

British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830

Kristin M. Girten

Bucknell University Press, 2023

Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”

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Faithful Fictions

The Catholic Novel in British Literature

Thomas M. Woodman

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Catholic writers have made a rich contribution to British fiction, despite their minority status. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark are well-known examples, but there are many other significant novelists whose work has a Catholic aspect. This is the first book to survey the whole range of this material and examine whether valid generalizations can be made about it. In charting such fiction from its development in the Victorian period through to the work of contemporaries such as David Lodge, the author analyses its complex relationships with changes in British society and the international Church. There is more than one way of being a Catholic, as Woodman shows, but he also demosntrates that many of these writers share common themes and a distinctive perspective. They often wish in particular to use their religion as a weapon against what they portray as a complacent Protestant or secular society. Their consciousness of writing in the midst of such a society gives a special edge to their treatments of the perennial Catholic themes of suffering, sin and sex. It also has implications for literary form and relates to what has been seen as the extremist mode of Catholic fiction. The final question that Woodman puts is whether the changes in the Church since the Second Vatican Council must inevitably lead to the loss of this distinctive Catholic contribution to the novel.

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Romantic Globalism

British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830

Evan Gottlieb

The Ohio State University Press

Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 explores how British literature of the late eighteenth century and Romantic era both reflects and inflects the increasingly global world in which it was produced and consumed. Building on recent work in globalization studies, cosmopolitanism, and critical theory, Evan Gottlieb investigates the ways in which, following the economic and historiographical writings of the Scottish Enlightenment, a number of influential Romantic-era authors began representing, mediating, and even critiquing their experiences of globalization in poetry, fiction, and drama.

Although modern media tend to represent globalization as an essentially contemporary phenomenon, many scholars now agree that its fundamental dynamics—especially its characteristic annulment of spatial and temporal differences—have been present for several centuries. Moreover, the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth century saw the convergence of a number of world-changing socio-political developments in the Western world. Romantic Globalism is significant because it is the first extended scholarly study that brings together these lines of inquiry. In so doing, Romantic Globalism not only charts a new course of study for British Romanticism but also suggests how the Romantics’ visions of globality might still be valuable to us today.

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The Spirit of Reform

British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867

Patrick Brantlinger

Harvard University Press, 1977