Subject Guide: Literature

Provides what the author considered the best and favorite scenes and insights as to what the author wishes to accomplish with this passage and the literary devices he or she employs.

Details events in the lives of the Bronte sisters and their associates.

Examines the connections between American philosophy and often-neglected works of literature.

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from its emergence in the 18th century to the present.

Presents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900.

Offers a wide-ranging narrative overview of literature in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

Helps readers to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers.

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.

Examines 19th-century social, political, and representational literacies and reading practices to reveal how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement.

Considers the life and work of Elizabeth Stoddard and her current marginal status in the evolving canon of American literary studies.

Places major literary works within the context of the topics that engaged a great number of American writers from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression.

Discusses the issues and events that engaged American writers who lived between 1600 and 1865, providing original and useful readings of important literary works that demonstrate how context contributes to meaning.

Presents career biographies and criticism of American travel writers between 1776 and 1864.

Spans from colonial days to the present.

Information about American women writers.

Provides literary history and biographical notes to show the crucial role women played in 19th-century French poetry and to explain why they were criticized and often eclipsed.

Provides literary history and biographical notes to show the crucial role women played in 19th-century French poetry and to explain why they were criticized and often eclipsed.

Recounts how the work of 19th-century legal historians actually influenced the editing of Old English texts, most notably Beowulf, in ways that are still preserved in our editions.

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.

Argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistake--the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the 19th-century novel.

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

Accounts of the lives of the major and minor British authors of the 19th century.

Critical analyses of 11 British women writers and their works.

Recovers the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era.

Offers an account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life who was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement.

Provides high quality critical material on a selection of important classic and contemporary children's books.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining classic books.

Traces the Indian English novel from its 19th-century colonial origins to the turn of the twenty-first century, with each chapter focusing on a particular historical moment.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Examines plays by Black and Asian women in Britain.

Covers poetry from over 40 countries and the history of poetry from antiquity to the 21st century.

Reexamines the fiction of the great 20th century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology.

Collection of conversations regarding the development and future of the literary canon.

Argue that the democratic ideal and practice of equality are grounded less in government documents written by a handful of white men than in the actions and writings of the radical abolitionists of the 19th century.

Examines the way pivotal 20th century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America.

Short essays about important British writers of the 19th or the 20th century.

Guide to the history and development of feminist literature, from early fairy tales to works by great women writers of today.

Covers the most important writers outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland since 1800.

Considers the writings of the British dynasty family, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley collectively.

Offers an inspired counterpoint to studies that emphasize differences between male and female Romantic-era writers.

Explores the history of women and feminism throughout literature, from classical antiquity to modern times.

Companion for literature surveys of feminist critical and theoretical texts from over 100 writers and scholars are featured.

Uses film, literature, history, science, and even punk music to help us understand the meaning of this monster made by man.

Recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters and fictitious journalists in novels.

Analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, paintings, and photographs to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.

Examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War.

Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the historical evidence for the presence of ancient Greek tragedy in the post-Restoration British theatre.

Recounts the full adventures of Harriet Jacobs, before and after slavery.

Argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern individual are quite literally one and the same.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Emphasizes the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach.

Examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women since the end of slavery and Reconstruction.

Comprehensive study of the Irish writers of the Victorian age.

Claims that Irish long fictions were plentiful, readable, and illuminating.

Argues that the significance of Coetzee's fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.

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.

Explores the literary dialectic that began with the 1848 publication of Charlotte Bront and novels by American writers that were direct or indirect reactions to it.

Presents career biographies and criticism of Japanese writers from between 1868-1945.

Presents examples of the work of more than 100 Japanese women poets, arranged chronologically, and of all the major verse forms.

Uses previously unpublished letters by women writers to explore the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences.

Presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Argues that kinship relations between writers, both literal and figurative, played a central part in the creation of a national tradition of English literature.

Helps those researching the American Realism and Naturalism literary period lasted from roughly 1861 to 1914.

Charts the history and confluence of literature and film.

A survey of the interaction between science and Anglo-American literature from the late medieval period to the 20th century, examining how authors, thinkers, and philosophers have viewed science in literary texts, and used science as a window to the future.

Explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life.

Analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late 18th-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets.

Shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism.

Offers analysis of Stael's life and mentality.

Demonstrates that beginning in the 1850s, women writers challenged Scottish Common Sense philosophy which had subordinated aesthetic motivation to moral and educational goals.

A study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s.

Uses German writing since 1750 to study literature as a cultural and spiritual resource in modern societies.

Traces English prose fiction from its late medieval origins through its stories of rogues and criminals, family rebellions and suffering heroines, to the present-day novels of immigration.

Shows how Romantic nationalism in Britain explored irony's potential as a powerful source of civic cohesion.

Commentary on the careers and works of acclaimed poets, novelists, short story writers, dramatists and philosophers who died between 1800 and 1899.

Profiles 80 significant African American literature writers spanning from the 18th century to the present.

Considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling.

Surveys the history of Western poetry from the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern period.

Explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer's reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas.

Tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the 20th century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address.

Shows that conceptions of privacy in the 19th century became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification.

Comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context of English Literature that covers the core periods of literature and history from the English Renaissance to the present.

Documents Hopkins's early family life and her ancestral connections to 19th-century New England, the African slave trade, and 20th-century race activism in the North.

Includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world.

Reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's 19th century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message.

Discusses how literature influences the United States.

Invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War.

Provides both the theoretical framework and historical background of Brontë's novels and explores how disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

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.

Conveys the breadth and diversity of poetry in the Victorian era.

Focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put valorized "natural" feminine traits into practice.

Explores how our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative.

Argues that Romanticism, particularly British Romantic poetry, invents psychoanalysis in advance of Freud.

Provides a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama.

Analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction.

Explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction.

Explores the ethical implication of the nearly universal human obsession with narratives.

Discusses a wide variety of forgotten novels by Victorian women writers and argues that these once popular but now neglected works deserve greater critical attention.

Provides a social history of girls' series fiction published in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century.

Captures and examines sociological insights in 32 essays that discuss scholars and writers not normally associated with any sociological school of thought.

Explores how Scott's work became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why it no longer has this role.

Uses American classic stories to define classic literature.

Constructs a tradition of American women's writing that is multiple and inclusive and that brings together women's voices from across a broad spectrum of U.S. social life.

Shows us how the Brontës became cultural symbols almost as soon as their novels were published and how they became notorious even before the veil dropped from their carefully chosen pseudonyms

Comprehensive guide to the writings, characters, achievements, and personal history of the Brontes.

Dispells the myths about the Brontës, yet provides startling new compelling information about them.

A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of the city from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.

Introduces Victorian literature and discusses influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts.

Comprehensive interpretive history of novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 2001.

Tells how biography first developed as a popular form, and how it shaped the reputations of the early 19th-century Romantic poets.

An illuminating, learned, well-written, and entertaining survey of the giants of world literature.

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.

Charts the development of women's contribution to the world of letters within Great Britain from AD 700 to 1830.

Covers a wide range of films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir.

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.

Examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life.

Traces the evolution of what the diaries reveal as Gladstone's central intellectual preoccupations, theology and classical scholarship,as well as the groundwork of his early Conservatism and his mature Liberalism.

Argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known 20th century authors and canonical Romantic writers.

Connects social reform to the formal features of literary works and relationships between English and the U.S. through novel-writing.

Highlights the variety of ways the changing world of 19th-century journalism shaped the period's most popular literary form.

Provides comprehensive and detailed information about the lives, works, and reputations of the Bronts.

Offers a new understanding of Victorian novels through Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Anthology of African American women's literature that covers poems, essays, journal entries, and short stories to novels and black feminist criticism in the 18th century through the early 21st century.

Looks at history as seen through the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family

Introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period.

Showcases 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women.

Humorous tour of the Western literary canon from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists.

Offers an original approach to Hardy's art as a novelist and entirely new readings of certain musical scenes in Hardy's works.

Anthology of the final works of great poets.

Brings together many of the great prose pieces--essays, letters, declarations, defenses, manifestos, and apologia--by the most influential European and American poets.

Offers 17 plays with critical commentaries that span the range of Western writing for the theatre from the Greeks to the post-moderns.

Introduces Victorian literature and its context from 1837-1900.

Explores the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination.

Collection, introductions, and annotations of familiar and unfamiliar primary social, cultural, political and historical documents necessary for contextualising key texts from the Victorian period.

Brings together the Romantic and Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome and women as writers and readers in the 19th century.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Surveys the Western dramatic tradition from Ancient Greece to modern America.

Examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular Uncle Tom's Cabin by preaching a "theology of whiteness" from within the pages of the books.

Presents a bite-sized piece of literary history that looks at the origins and composition of 50 well-known pieces of literature.

Enters the consciousness an influential figure in the history of American letters to reveal a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture.

Examines the self-conscious and complex ways in which Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat used sensation as both authors and magazine editors.

Contributes to current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the 20th century.

Explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the U.S. into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development.

Traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse from the Civil War to the early 20th century.

Contains entries on 74 authors who were actively writing during the renaissance in 19th-century America.

Presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel and provides a plot summary, an overview of the work's historical background, a literary analysis, and suggestions for further reading.

Study of the co-emergence of the U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel.

Shows how the meaning of Uncle Tom's Cabin changed over time.

Explores 19th-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

Argues that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened.

Demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the that the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction.

Focuses on Oceania's impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children.

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

Seeks to recuperate the idea of a common American culture while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded.

Explores the impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

Traces the steady rise of antiwar writing in American literature from the Civil War to the eve of World War I.

Uses seven popular novels about the Civil War to show that the war owes much of its cultural power to postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans.

Interdisciplinary study of the Civil War and its enduring impact on American writers and filmmakers.

Features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

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

Chronicles world literature from the Classical Age through the 20th century, discussing literary developments and the relationship between literature and the political and social climate of each historical period.

Traces the course of that development from George Eliot's initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive world view, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels.

Comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Offers a provocative look at some of Western civilization's most infamous authors and their literary works and shows how these works have inflicted great evil in the world and still cause suffering.

Provides an overview of developments of French children literature from the 17th century to the present day.

Examines the ways in which William Shakespeare's stories have been adapted for children, particularly in Mary and Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare in 1807.

Provides new perspectives on early children's literary texts and the work of children's literature scholar Mitzi Myers through the use of new historicist, feminist, and cultural studies critiques.

Examines the agenda behind the shaping of 19th-century children's perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults through children's literature.

Identifies a "schoolroom canon" that some older Americans will still recognize, composed of poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Field, Riley, Dickinson, and others.

Uses diverse authors to show how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

Comprehensive list of mood-altering stories

Presents thematic groupings of titles built around current young adult literature for use in bridging to the classics.

Exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them.

Tells of the rise and development of literary tourism in 19th-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats and Burns to Scott, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy.

Paints a detailed picture of everyday life at Haworth in the 1840s, recounting the Brontes family history and describing the local village and surrounding countryside.

Meet Shakespeare, Heine and Hogarth south of the river, find Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, discover Blake and Trollope in Westminster, happen on the Carlyles in Chelsea, come across John Keats in beautiful Hampstead, and search for Bacon and Hanif Kureishi in the London suburbs.

Lists hundreds of places in Britain and Ireland and details their connections with the lives of famous writers.

Explores the personal and professional histories of writers such as, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O'Casey and examines their relationships with the people, culture, and landscapes of Ireland.

Tells of the unique and influential friendship in action between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, of the lives they led, and their influential works.

An eight-state literary tour of great writers from the Midwest of the U.S. and famous places associated with them.

Invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers, including O. Henry and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of many house museums of well-known American authors.

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

Tests readers' knowledge of classic and contemporary literature.

Uses readings of prose and poetry from both the U. S. and abroad to highlight the variety of ways modernist writers represented the quotidian details of modern life, even during times of political crisis and war.

Explains how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres.

Discusses modernist poetics and explores the peculiarities of the American literary field.

Clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars.

Several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

Takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world.

Tracks the evolution of Modernism from its emergence in the late 19th century to its recent incarnations.

Focuses on English-language literary modernism and the period 1890-1939 along with important precursors and successors of the movement.

Revisits the Bildungsroman genre with a special interest in self-development and identity, as well as the viability of the classical concept of Bildung in the modernist era.

Examines novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence.

Helps readers to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers.

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

Traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the 19th century.

Reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of 20th-century writers.

John Updike's 6th collection of literary biographies and essays on various topics.

Collection of psychoanalytic readings of literary texts and literary readings of psychoanalytic texts.

Excerpts more than 200 feminist primary source documents from Africa to Asia to the Americas to Australia.

Explores how character, courage, and human and moral understanding can be fostered by reflecting on the lives of others, through stories.

Invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation.

Anthologies of the prose, poetry, drama, letters, diaries, court reports, newspapers, and journals of Irish writers.

Traces evolving treatments of female adolescence through popular women's literature.

First extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance.

Compares modern literary treatments of "end of the world" stories and charts an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a lasting new order.

Examines the role of women poets of African descent in shaping the history of the Americas.

Defense of Victorian literature's enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life and between reading and thinking.

Re-evaluates the authors and texts generally recognized as the 'canon' of Irish literature in the light of newly-identified famine discourse.

Anthology of Romantic authors in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Discusses resources for both primary and secondary research of the British Romantic Era.

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.

Argues that Milton's influence in the 19th century was pervasiveness.

Studies the the literature and art of the 1890s as an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down.

Uses contemporary poetry, essays, fiction, scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism in the first half of the 19th century to give a new account of this literature's relationship with science.

First full study of the autobiography, examining both the conditions and the practice of autobiographical writing in Romantic literature.

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

Covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction.

Provides students and scholars with historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism.

Introduction to British literature challenging traditional 18th century and Romantic studies and exploring the development of literary genres and modes in a period of rapid change.

Uses readings of a variety of novels, poems, and play to guide readers through all the major concepts, themes and issues that characterize Victorian literature.

Discusses traditional and new resources for researching this period of British literature and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

Weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice.

Explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden 19th century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world.

Uses diverse authors to show how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

An overview of the work that features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

Examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

Analyzes Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his late 19th and early 20th century fiction.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Hill's criticism of poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley).

Provides a comprehensive treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from its emergence in the 18th century to the present.

Contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others.

Uses Dicken's four books - Nicholas Nickelby, Barnaby Rudge, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit - to show how his traditional social philosophy lies at the heart of Dickens's artistic achievement.

Explores the history of women and feminism throughout literature, from classical antiquity to modern times.

Companion for literature surveys of feminist critical and theoretical texts from over 100 writers and scholars are featured.

Explores the impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

Analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, paintings, and photographs to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.

Evaluates Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison from an orthodox Christian perspective.

Shows how the types of character, plot, setting, and symbol that Hawthorne used in his four best known novels were drawn from his reading of the Bible.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Focuses on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, but also refers to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions.

Brings words from some of the brilliant women who have been the revealers of their times, from a 9th-century mother in France writing a poignant self-help book for the son from whom she is separated, to a modern-day social campaigner in New York.

Moves seamlessly through a wide range of post-Reformation writers encountering and sometimes confronting institutional Christianity.

Places Dickens and Wilkie Collins against such important figures as John Henry Newman and George Eliot in seeking to recover their response to the religious controversies of mid-19th century England.

Demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective.

Argues that the religious import of American environmental literature have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source of "something that takes us out of ourselves."

Highlights Twain's attractions to and engagements with the wide variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime, and how these matters affected his writings.

Argues that Milton's influence in the 19th century was pervasiveness.

Offers the idea that the modern "crisis of faith" is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

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

Connects social reform to the formal features of literary works and relationships between English and the U.S. through novel-writing.

Asks why these ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants were so deep, why they continued into the 19th century and how novelists and poets, theologians and preachers, historians and essayists reinterpreted the religious debates.

Applies interdisciplinary approaches to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

Explores 19th-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

Investigates the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience itself.

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.

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.

Conveys the breadth and diversity of poetry in the Victorian era.

Promotes reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them, and tells why until quite recently anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Uses literature and culture to show how anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to diverse issues in society.

Explores how our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Focuses on Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.

Provides a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama.

Identifies a "schoolroom canon" that some older Americans will still recognize, composed of poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Field, Riley, Dickinson, and others.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief.

Examines novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence.

Introduces Victorian literature and its context from 1837-1900.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Explores Dostoevsky's critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time.