Explore the vast range of titles available.

Godwinian Momentsis the first ever book collection on the work of William Godwin, the radical British philosopher, novelist, and pamphleteer who contributed extensively to the political and cultural shifts of 1783 to 1834.

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin’s political project.

In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal withMemoirs of the Author of \"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.\"Most controversial were the details of the romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gilbert Imlay and Godwin himself. Wollstonecraft's life and writings became central to a continuing discussion about love's place in human society. Literary radicals argued that the cultivation of intense friendship could lead to the renovation of social and political institutions, whereas others maintained that these freethinkers were indulging their own desires with a disregard for stability and higher authority. Through correspondence and novels, Andrew Cayton finds an ideal lens to view authors, characters, and readers all debating love's power to alter men and women in the world around them.Cayton argues for Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's enduring influence on fiction published in Great Britain and the United States and explores Mary Godwin Shelley's endeavors to sustain her mother's faith in romantic love as an engine of social change.

In 1873, architect E. W. Godwin (1833‒86) embarked on a month-long trip through France’s Normandy region, accompanied by his partner, the actress Ellen Terry (1847‒1928), and their daughter Edy. A year later, Godwin published a series of articles on this excursion in a Victorian architectural periodical, The Building News. Entitled ‘Some Notes of a Month in Normandy’, the articles chronicled Godwin’s travels to Rouen, Mantes, Évreux, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, St Lô, and Coutances, ending in Dieppe. As would be expected of one of England’s prominent Gothic Revival architects, Godwin concentrated on the important examples of medieval architecture he encountered in what was a combined holiday and sketching tour. Nevertheless, a few human interest observations pepper his text, such as remarks on the cleanliness of provincial hotels and the quality of food and drink encountered. Compared to the autobiographical impulse of today’s travel writers, however, Godwin’s account is maddeningly self-effacing, with virtually no personal details vouchsafed. In line with his restricted focus on architectural themes, Godwin’s trip was to a large extent une répétition différente of the journey to Normandy taken by John Ruskin (1819‒1900) in 1848. Ruskin travelled throughout Normandy soon after his marriage to Euphemia Gray, visiting Boulogne, Abbeville, Rouen, Falaise, Avranches, Mont-Saint-Michel, Bayeux, Caen, and Honfleur, before arriving in Paris. The drawings of Norman cathedrals that Ruskin prepared during this trip became some of the most important illustrations to The Seven Lamps of Architecture, published in 1849, a volume Godwin referenced during his own trip through France. In order to assess Godwin’s travel account, I will make use of the concept of ‘intertextuality’ formulated in the twentieth century by the literary theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941). As Kristeva has posited, individual texts may be understood as participating in a matrix of relationships with previous texts. In Godwin’s case, his articles participated in a discursive field formed not only by Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture but also by the accounts of Norman architecture published by the eminent French medievalist Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814‒79) and restoration architect Aymar Pierre Verdier (1819‒80), in addition to the drawings by Godwin’s British colleagues Eden Nesfield (1835‒88) and William Burges (1827‒81), all of whom Godwin mentions. Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality will help clarify the extent to which Godwin’s travel narrative can be understood primarily as a contribution to this network of commentary. Finally, reading Godwin’s travel account as part of this textual and graphic fabric can also serve to identify the emergence of his individual interests. Following in Ruskin’s footsteps—literally and textually—Godwin began to articulate in the course of his ‘Notes’ the principles of ‘judicious eclecticism’ that would eventually differentiate him from Ruskin and form the basis of his later career.

The debate about world literature holds a prominent place in national and comparative literary studies today. However, despite its significance, critics have yet to reach a consensus on how to address its challenges, which include its methodology, the vast volume of texts, uneven circulation, and difficulties of translation. This essay examines the concerns of world literature through the lens of William Godwin’s philosophy on history writing. While Godwin’s historical perspective has not been widely discussed in relation to world literature, his reflections on history and history writing that resist a comparative approach to universal history engage with similar issues found in the debates on world literature. Delving into Godwin’s writings on history, which challenge distant approaches to history and stress the importance of the individual and the particular, this essay argues that Godwin’s pursuit of a purposeful and intimate relationship with the past offers important insights for addressing the issues of world literature. In particular, Godwin’s emphasis on the purpose of studying history and his affectionate approach toward the temporal “other” provide helpful directions in forming respectful relationships with the geographical and ethnic “other” and their literature. Godwin’s pursuit of deep knowledge and friendship with the inspiring past proposes a valuable alternative to seeking systematic incorporation of the other’s literature or unthinkingly expanding world literary canon.

The type series boundary and the name-bearing type designation of each cyclophorid taxon originally described by Godwin-Austen are clarified based on an interpretation that complies with the ICZN. Previous statuses of type specimens designated by previous authors are reconsidered. Lectotypes of Spiraculum oakesi Godwin-Austen, 1915, Spiraculum kempi Godwin-Austen, 1915, Pterocyclos aborensis Godwin-Austen, 1915, Pterocyclos miriensis Godwin-Austen, 1915, Pterocyclos brahmakundensis Godwin-Austen, 1915, Spiraculum luyorensis Godwin-Austen, 1915, Spiraculum putaoensis Godwin-Austen, 1915, and Theobaldius oakesi Godwin-Austen, 1915 are here designated to stabilize the existing nomenclature. In addition, the type specimens of Pterocyclos miriensis and Theobaldius oakesi are photographed and figured for the first time.

This paper uses the context of early modern English colonialism and empire building to propose a new reading of Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone. My reading of this text focuses on Godwin’s narrator, the Spanish picaro Domingo Gonsales, and postulates that the choice to fictionalize a Spaniard’s lunar voyage is deeply tied to Godwin’s personal anxieties over the state of Spanish colonialism and the nescient English Empire. By choosing a Spanish protagonist over an Englishman, Godwin is able to explore the logical conclusion of the Spanish imperial project—colonization that has subsumed terrestrial conquest and moved into the celestial spheres. When The Man in the Moone suggests that a Spaniard is already beginning to make the transition to extraterrestrial colonization, Godwin is forced to confront the possibility that an English alternative to Spanish colonialism may no longer be possible.

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century.While engaging both genres, Romantic Narrative responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that poiesis, as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism’s legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley’s Alastor and his Gothic novels, Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman. Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism’s leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, Romantic Narrative will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory.

A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin , were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century.

A key moment in Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady occurs when the story’s heroine, Isabel, enters the drawing room in her Roman palazzo to find her husband Gilbert Osmond seated and their guest Madame Merle standing. As several commentators have noted, Osmond violates codes of gentlemanly conduct by remaining seated while the woman stands. The simple detail of the figures’ postures criticises Osmond for his lapse in manners and adumbrates the fact that it is Madame Merle who exerts power over the novel’s main characters. The incident connects with other scenes that align Osmond, an aesthete, with furniture, cushions, and domestic décor as well with the bodily positions of sitting and resting. As Isabel observes of her husband, ‘he has a genius for upholstery’. James continues his focus on posture in his novel on the Aesthetic Movement, The Tragic Muse (1890). Published the year before Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel is set, like Wilde’s, in the two most characteristic milieux of British Aestheticism: an artist’s studio and a theatre. James tells intertwined stories of a painter, Nick Dormer, and an actress, Miriam Rooth. The characters who visit Dormer’s studio are repeatedly described as lounging and reclining; ‘lolling’ is James’s preferred descriptor. Rooth, by contrast, is typically perpendicular: ‘preferring to stand’, she commands attention by a studied management of ‘the plastic quality of her person’. I propose to take a leaf from James’s attention to bodily disposition—pose and posture—to analyse interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement. My focus is on E. W. Godwin, foremost architect of Aestheticism, who is known for the artists’ houses and studios he designed in London in the 1870s and 1880s. To what extent do James’s descriptions of bodily positions in Dormer’s studio—and Wilde’s similar attention to deportment in Basil Hallward’s studio—bear similarities with Godwin’s actual interiors? Are the gender disparities underlined by James reflected in Godwin’s designs as well?