Subject Guide: Literature

Uses the motif of the mentor-lover to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender.

Uses botanical language to read courtship novels from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James.

Addresses the genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius.

Highlights Wayne Booth's contributions to literary and rhetorical studies.

Offers new interpretations that demonstrate the awareness that Austen's awareness of her narrative practice and of the novel's function as a social and political instrument.

Addresses these intriguing questions as What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression?

A study of the history of reading Jane Austen's novels.

Argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment and that her allegiance to a skeptical tradition within it lasted throughout her career.

Investigates how Austen worked with, and played upon, the cracks and faultlines which time had uncovered in the ideals of polite conversation.

Shows how Jane Austen was sometimes wildly venerated for markedly different reasons.

Incorporates the findings of new scholarship to enrich our understanding of Austen and give us the fullest and most revealing view yet of her life and family.

Offers a new way of approaching and reading of Jane Austen through her texts, the development of English Studies, and the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the 20th century.

Provides scholars with the necessary methods and tools for studying literature produced between 1880 and 1945.

Uses Jane Austen's discovered memoirs to delves into the secrets of Jane Austen's life, giving us untold insights into her mind and heart.

Asserts that Jane Austen's novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates.

Tells of over 500 literary locales across the United States and Europe.

Presents an original and lucid account of the relationship between philosophy and the novel.

Addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West.

An illustrated and annotated edition of Jane Austen's favorite and most popular work.

Offers a close analysis of novels that are uniquely representative of the 19th century, including the work of Austen, Eliot, Scott, Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Trollope, Braddon, and the Bronte sisters.

Takes as its starting point the wide-ranging work of Marilyn Butler on Romantic literature, and includes contributions by some of the most prominent scholars of Romanticism working today.

With humor and spirit, the author leads readers through landscapes Jane knew and loved and through emotional landscapes in which grace and hope take the place of stagnation and despair.

Tests readers' knowledge of classic and contemporary literature.

Considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to public speakers and examines the ways in which they conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavor.

Addresses the genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius.

Focuses on the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Water, the years the publishing industry began serving a mass readership, and the novels of Walter Scott, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines.

Argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure.

Draws on discoveries made over the past 30 years to tell the story of Swift's life.

Seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.