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It has always been thought difficult, if not impossible, to define what the philosophy of Carlyle was. Ever since the publication of Sartor Resartus in 1833-1834, the view that Carlyle had a theistic conception of the universe has been defended as well as opposed. At a time, therefore, when Carlyle's work as a whole is being reappraised, his philosophy should first and foremost be dealt with. Carlyle's life-philosophy is based on the inner experience of a process of 'conversion', which set in with an incident that occurred to him at Leith Walk, Edinburgh. This study - which settles the old question of the date of the incident - demonstrates that the inner struggle, the dynamics of which are described most fully in Sartor, is analogous to the Jungian process of individuation. For the first time in critical literature, the basic ideas of Carlyle's philosophy are thus linked to depth psychology and shown to be analogous to the fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology. In recent criticism, it has been asserted that the crisis recorded in Sartor is akin to the crisis of doubt said to underlie Jean Paul's \"Rede des todten Christus\" (1796), which is probably the first poetic expression of nihilism in European literature and has become a classic. Apart from demonstrating that, in the last fifty years at least, the \"Rede\" has erroneously been interpreted as a dream of annihilation, this book invalidates the view of Jean Paul as victim of the skepticism of his age, and argues that, contrary to what is usually maintained, the \"Rede\" is not the document of a crisis, but of a belief which had become antiquated and obsolete for Carlyle.

Using Aristotle's oikonomia to establish a paradigm of wholeness and authentic engagement, Desaulniers argues that Carlyle returns language to material wholeness by insisting on situating sign within representation so that the materiality of the sign is not surrendered to the idea imposed on it. By focusing on reading as an act of Constitution within The French Revolution, she places the political crisis within a linguistic one: the Constitution becomes both a thematic and self-reflexive constituent of the linguistic process.

Labelled \"an elegant Jeremiah\" by a journalist of his day, the urbane Victorian Matthew Arnold must have received the comparison with the Old Testament prophet uneasily. Writing in the 1970s, Norman Mailer seems to owe nothing to the biblical for his description of a long hot wait to buy a cold drink while reporting on the first voyage to the moon. Yet both Arnold and Mailer, George P. Landow asserts in this book, are sages, writers in the nonfiction prose form of secular prophecy, a genre richly influenced by the episodic structures and harshly critical attitudes toward society which characterize Old Testament prophetic literature. In this book, first published in 1986, Landow defines the genre by exploring its rhetoric, an approach that enables him to illuminate the relationships among representative works of the nineteenth century to one another, to biblical, oratorical, and homiletic traditions, and to such twentieth-century writers as Lawrence, Didion, and Mailer.

Work has had a problematic history in Western thought: disparaged as being contrary to contemplation, seen as a necessary burden, and invested with moral or even sacred value. In the Victorian era, a romantic-utilitarian dichotomy developed, and ideas of work were more radically divided than at any other time. On the one hand, the most popular mythologies propagated work as a value in itself - the 'Gospel of Work' - defining and building character and fostering well-being and a sense of fulfillment. On the other hand, with widespread industrialism, automation, and the division of labour, work was perceived as toil for extrinsic gain. Gospels and Gritexamines the literary representations of work and labour in the Victorian works of Thomas Carlyle and the twentieth-century writings of Joseph Conrad and George Orwell, exploring how the three systematically displaced the conflict between the Gospel of Work and a non-idealist, non-theoretical pragmatism. Rob Breton argues that these writers were unwilling or unable to provide a resolution to the conflicting discourses and locates fissures emerging out of the division between work and the economic. This is an important and well-written study that provides a new depth of insight into Victorian ideology and working-class culture.

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. Evoking moral and political debates of the Victorian age, this study investigates how African Americans and Britons perceived each another. Black America's romance with Victorian Britain and Britons' knowledge of black Americans, Dickerson argues, was largely the result of travelers who crossed the Atlantic and then shared their experiences--often by publishing them in nonfictional or fictional forms--with their compatriots. _x000B__x000B_From nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. In tracing the origins of this connection, Dark Victorians considers how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity and racism in America and how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of dark-skinned peoples. _x000B__x000B_

In grouping together in a single study the work of Blake, Carlyle, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence, one becomes aware of a common tradition in which they all participate, of certain shared principles, attitudes, and values, and, despite the individual inflexion of voice, a common language. No matter how distinct each author may be-and the intrinsic individuality of each should not be underestimated-that tradition is obviously Romantic and, more particularly, vitalist. Moreover, asone sees the continuation of that Romantic vitalism, often to varying degrees and taking different forms, in more contemporary writers-from Dylan Thomas, Richard Eberhart, the American Beat writers of the fifties, to Ted Hughes and, more recently, the Children of Albion-one recognizes also that Yeats's prediction, \"We were the last romantics\" was too gloomy in its finality.

Following Robert Owen, Ironside argued that poverty resulted from private property and competition, and would not be solved by repeal of the Corn Laws. [...]like many Chartists, Ironside insisted that the League was a tool of manufacturers and employers, who sought repeal of the Corn Laws as a means to lower the price of food in order to reduce workers' wages (Brown 348-50, 359-61; Pickering and Tyrell ch. 7). Remarkably, Ironside mounted the stage and began to \"read some extracts from Carlyle's 'Past and Present' on the subject of foreign competition,\" at which point the meeting descended into violence (\"Sheffield-Friends of Oastler\"; \"Liberation of Mr Oastler\").2 Ironside and Carlyle were agreed that abolition of the Corn Laws would not in itself solve the problem of working-class poverty, and that more radical measures of social reform were needed.3 During the mid-1840 s, Ironside became a leading member of the Owenite movement. According to his friend and fellow Chartist Thomas Cooper (1805-92), Ironside \"turned his little property into money and put it into the estate and establishment at Harmony Hall, and took his young wife with him to live there\" (Cooper 118-19). When his correspondence with Carlyle occurred in 1847, he was seeking alternative proposals for social reform (Salt, \"Hollow Meadows Farm Experiment\" 45-46; CL 20: 160; 6 Oct. 1847, CL 22: 119).4 As Gregory Claeys has shown, the failure of Harmony Hall and other model communities served to convince many Owenites that only the state and central government could bring about the new moral world (Citizens and Saints 161-62; Machinery, Money and the Millennium 146-47). [...]in the same period, many Chartists also began to look to the state to solve the problems of poverty (Finn 57-59).

Understanding that, among your other accomplishments, you have a solid knowledge of Art, I had designed to apply to you for help in regard to certain Prussian Portraits, intended for what they call the Library Edition of Frederick, now in progress of preparation here.2 But applications of that kind having uniformly proved so troublesome to my German friends, and futile to myself, I have finally come to the resolution of altogether discontinuing such; and making the resources I already have suffice me. Two days ago finally I hear of a Portrait by Pesne of the great King himself,-now in Sanssouci;8 but imagine (on Preuss's9 authority) that the King did not sit [to] Pesne; and that no Photograph or Copperplate of the Picture is worth my chacing10 in the circumstances.A11 In fact, dear sir, I expressly prohibit you from taking any trouble in regard to these matters; being, as I said, already provided for, better or worse;-and conclude with begging you to continue your kind thoughts towards me; and to believe that I am, and remain, Y sincerely obliged, T. Carlyle Dem Herrn Major v. Kessell12 TC to UC [\"Madam\"], 23 February 1851, ALS, 1 p., recto and verso. TC, who was never shy about providing aspiring writers with advice to avoid writing as a profession, here offers an extended version of his typical response to a hopeful author's wife. Perhaps some of the Eliza-Cook, Leigh-Hunt,1 or other Journals might find use for such compositions:-but in any case that kind of thing could not go far, or amount to a result that was considerable.- Your husband is still very young; and of course unfinished and uncultivated: he must in all ways, try to improve the years that now pass; let him read, observe, assiduously reflect and endeavour: this course will alone yield fruit to him, whether he write or not.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in liteature. Each volume presents contemporary responses on a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.