Explore the vast range of titles available.

Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott’s nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply downwards in the twentieth century. Austen’s popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott’s, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors’ own time. To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher’s relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors their uninterrupted loyalty. The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism, Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural history.

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism’s cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst’s work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the ‘new aestheticism’ and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno.

Examining the global dimensions of Neo-Victorianism, this book explores how the appropriation of Victorian images in contemporary literature and culture has emerged as a critical response to the crises of decolonization and Imperial collapse. Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire explores the phenomenon by reading a range of popular and literary Anglophone neo-Victorian texts, including Alan Moore's Graphic Novel From Hell, works by Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood, the films of Jackie Chan and contemporary 'Steampunk' science fiction. Through these readingsElizabeth Ho explores how constructions of popular memory and fictionalisations of the past reflect political and psychological engagements with our contemporary post-Imperial circumstances.

This title offers a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by figures in Victorian theatre. \"Great Shakespeareans\" offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of William Charles Macready, Edwin Booth, Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

This is a critical analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by nineteenth-century female actors and scholars. \"Great Shakespeareans\" offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Charlotte Cushman and Fanny Kemble to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

What is steampunk? Fashion craze, literary genre, lifestyle - or all of the above? Playing with the scientific innovations and aesthetics of the Victorian era, steampunk creatively warps history and presents an alternative future, imagined from a nineteenth-century perspective. In her interdisciplinary book, Claire Nally delves into this contemporary subculture, explaining how the fashion, music, visual culture, literature and politics of steampunk intersect with theories of gender and sexuality. Exploring and occasionally critiquing the ways in which gender functions in the movement, she addresses a range of different issues, including the controversial trope of the Victorian asylum; gender and the graphic novel; the legacies of colonialism; science and the role of Ada Lovelace as a feminist steampunk icon. Drawing upon interviews, theoretical readings and textual analysis, Nally asks: why are steampunks fascinated by our Victorian heritage, and what strategies do they use to reinvent history in the present?

“Negative capability”, the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea. It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats’s own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats’s poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including King Lear, illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept.

Youth, Heroism and War Propaganda explores how the young maritime hero became a major new figure of war propaganda in the second half of the long 18th century.At that time, Britain was searching for a new national identity, and the young maritime hero and his exploits conjured images of vigour, energy, enthusiasm and courage.

The figure of Dante's Beatrice can be seen as a cultural phenomenon or myth during the nineteenth century, inspiring a wide variety of representations in literature and the visual arts.This study looks at the cultural afterlife of Beatrice in the Victorian period in remarkably different contexts.