Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.
In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.
Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity
Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange.
In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‑Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.
This edition offers texts from Bathsua Makin and Mary More, and Robert Whitehall’s response to More’s argument. Makin describes the appropriate education for London merchants’ daughters, arguing that girls should be educated and should aspire to follow learned women in history, and that educated women improve their families and themselves. More argues that women have the right to an education, and that such an education shows that the inequality of married women under English law is a man-made institution. More’s argument drew objections from her Oxford reader, Robert Whitehall, who preserved her manuscript with his own. Makin and More enjoyed a measure of public recognition and esteem, yet after their deaths, they and their texts were largely ignored until the late twentieth century.
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines students, teachers, and frustrated scholars—at the center of their books. Educating Women analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual and professional achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals and by the forging of social rather than institutional ties.
Focusing on works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anna Leonowens, and Thomas Hardy, Laura Morgan Green demonstrates that those texts are shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education, on the one hand, and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity, on the other. Educating Women shows that the nineteenth-century “heroines” of both history and fiction were in fact as indebted to domestic ideology as they were eager to transform it.
Eighteenth-Century Contexts offers a lively array of essays that consider literary, intellectual, political, theological, and cultural aspects of the years 1650–1800, in the British Isles and Europe. At the center of the book is Jonathan Swift; several essays delve into his poetry, his similarities to Bernard Mandeville, his response to Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, and the relationship between his Gulliver’s Travels and Thomas More’s Utopia. Other essays discuss Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century music and poetry, William Congreve, James Boswell, Samuel Richardson, and women’s novels of the eighteenth century.
Taking seriously Ireland’s euphemism for World War II, “the Emergency,” Anna Teekell’s Emergency Writing asks both what happens to literature written during a state of emergency and what it means for writing to be a response to an emergency.
Anchored in close textual analysis of works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, and Patrick Kavanagh, and supported by archival material and historical research, Emergency Writing shows how Irish late modernism was a response to the sociopolitical conditions of a newly independent Irish Free State and to a fully emerged modernism in literature and art. What emerges in Irish writing in the wake of Independence, of the Gaelic Revival, of Yeats and of Joyce, is a body of work that invokes modernism as a set of discursive practices with which to counter the Free State’s political pieties.
Emergency Writing provides a new approach to literary modernism and to the literature of conflict, considering the ethical dilemma of performing neutrality—emotionally, politically, and rhetorically—in a world at war.
Emma, perhaps the most technically accomplished of all of Austen’s novels, is also, after Pride and Prejudice, her most popular one. Its numerous film and television adaptations testify to the world’s enduring affection for the headstrong, often misguided Emma Woodhouse and her many romantic schemes. Like the previous volumes in Harvard’s celebrated annotated Austen series, Emma: An Annotated Edition is a beautiful and illuminating gift edition that will be treasured by readers.
Stimulating and helpful annotations appear in the book’s margins, offering information, definitions, and commentary. In his Introduction, Bharat Tandon suggests several ways to approach the novel, enabling a larger appreciation of its central concerns and accomplishments. Appearing throughout the book are many illustrations, often in color, which help the reader to better picture the Regency-era world that serves as the stage for Emma’s matchmaking adventures.
Whether explaining the intricacies of early nineteenth-century dinner etiquette or speculating on Highbury’s deliberately imprecise geographical location, Tandon serves as a delightful and entertaining guide. For those coming to the novel for the first time or those returning to it, Emma: An Annotated Edition offers a valuable portal to Austen’s world.
"The Empire Inside is unique in its tight focus on the objects from one geographical location, and their deployment in one genre of fiction. This combination results in a powerful study with a wealth of fine formal analyses of literary texts and a similar trove of marvelous historical data."
---Elaine Freedgood, New York University
"In The Empire Inside, Suzanne Daly does a wonderful job integrating an array of primary materials, especially novels and journal essays, to show the extent to which these ‘foreign’ colonial products of India represented absolutely central aspects of domestic life, at once part of the unremarkable everyday experience of Victorians and rich with meanings."
---Timothy Carens, College of Charleston
By the early nineteenth century, imperial commodities had become commonplace in middle-class English homes. Such Indian goods as tea, textiles, and gemstones led double lives, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels reveals how Indian imports encapsulated new ideas about both the home and the world in Victorian literature and culture. In novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope, the regularity with which Indian commodities appear bespeaks their burgeoning importance both ideologically and commercially. Such domestic details as the drinking of tea and the giving of shawls as gifts point us toward suppressed connections between the feminized realm of private life and the militarized realm of foreign commerce.
Tracing the history of Indian imports yields a record of the struggles for territory and political power that marked the coming-into-being of British India; reading the novels of the period for the ways in which they infuse meaning into these imports demonstrates how imperialism was written into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century England. Situated at the intersection of Victorian studies, material cultural studies, gender studies, and British Empire studies, The Empire Inside is written for academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in all of these fields.
Suzanne Daly is Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Empty Garden draws a portrait of Milton as a cultural and religious critic who, in his latest and greatest poems, wrote narratives that illustrate the proper relationships among the individual, the community, and God. Rushdy argues that the political theory implicit in these relationships arises from Milton’s own drive for self-knowledge, a kind of knowledge that gives the individual freedom to act in accordance with his or her own understanding of God’s will rather than the state’s. Rushdy redefines Milton’s creative spirit in a way that encompasses his poetic, political, and religious careers.
There are separate languages to be understood in the writings of French and English Romantics, Margery Sabin tells us. Instead of minimizing the importance of national characteristics, as comparatistes frequently do, she demonstrates that national traditions of thought and language have a determining influence throughout the Romantic period. In tracking the differing courses pursued by the best French and English writers of the period, she shows that the idea of the transcendental imagination never took hold among the French-Romantics; that Wordsworth's ideal of the marriage between mind and nature did not inform the vision of the French, who were preoccupied with the isolated human spirit thrown back on its own resources of conscience or faith.
A detailed and far-ranging comparison of Rousseau's Confessions and Wordsworth's Prelude establishes her provocative argument. The idea gains force from the wealth of examples that follow. Sabin examines Wordsworth, Coleridge, and George Eliot as representative of varieties of English Romanticism in the genres of lyric poetry, critical theory, and the novel. Contrasts between these writers and Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert offer new and more precise ways of understanding both Romanticism and later departures from it. Her sensitive readings of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others yield further evidence. This fresh critical perspective will generate further thought about major writers and about national differences in literature.
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits.
The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.
Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis
Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.
Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.
As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.
George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century. Every Intellectual's Big Brother explores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life.
In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled "Their Orwell, Left and Right," which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the "Orwell Confraternity Today," those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.
Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.
A fascinating analysis of anonymous publication centuries before the digital age
Everywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Anonymous authorship was typical of the time, yet literary scholars and historians have been generally unable to account for it as anything more than a footnote or curiosity.
Mark Vareschi shows the entangled relationship between mediation and anonymity, revealing the nonhuman agency of the printed text. Drawing richly on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, Vareschi brings together philosophy, literary theory, and media theory in a trenchant analysis, uncovering a history of textual engagement and interpretation that does not hinge on the known authorial subject.
In discussing anonymous poetry, drama, and the novel along with anonymously published writers such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott, he unveils a theory of mediation that renews broader questions about agency and intention. Vareschi argues that textual intentionality is a property of nonhuman, material media rather than human subjects alone, allowing the anonymous literature of the eighteenth century to speak to contemporary questions of meaning in the philosophy of language. Vareschi closes by exploring dubious claims about the death of anonymity and the reexplosion of anonymity with the coming of the digital. Ultimately, Everywhere and Nowhere reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.
The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot.
Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was “consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization.” His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a “transformation of values.”
Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action—mockery, parody, or caricature—and through the use of a “comic pointer” who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.
Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.
Kathrine Varnes teaches English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of the book of poems, The Paragon. Her poems and essays have appeared in many books and journals.
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