English Literature
Against the Despotism of Fact
First comprehensive account of the figure of the Irish Celt in modern British and Irish literature.
Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene
Forges a fresh interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvre as a response to ecological instability.
Medicine Is War
Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor.
Kept from All Contagion
Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.
Jane Austen's Women
An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen.
Antipodal England
Examines Victorian conceptions of home and identity by looking at portrayals and accounts of middle-class emigration to Australia.
Victorian Fetishism
Examines the importance of fetishism in nineteenth-century cultural theory.
Literary Remains
Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing.
Aging by the Book
Uncovers the origins of midlife anxiety in Victorian print culture.
Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture
Argues that Byron’s popularity marked the beginning of celebrity as a cultural identity.
Chaucerian Spaces
Examines affect and the significance of space and place in the first six Canterbury Tales.
Anxious Anatomy
Examines the body in literature and science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.
The Mighty Scot
Turns a spotlight on the Victorian love affair with Scotland.
Excavating Victorians
How Victorians reacted to the new sciences of geology and archaeology.
White Horizon
From explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.
Romantic Psychoanalysis
How the Romantics invented psychoanalysis in advance of Freud.
Cholera and Nation
How cholera epidemics affected Victorian perceptions of the body and the nation.
Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel
Traces Woolf’s persistent yet vexed fascination with nineteenth-century descriptions of English domesticity and female creativity.
Buried Communities
Offers an explanation for the poet's mysterious and longstanding preoccupation with death and grief.
The Language of the Eyes
Recovers a dynamic women’s tradition of vision and sexuality, challenging Darwinian and Freudian accounts of women as nonvisual sexual agents.
The Perversity of Poetry
Explains why poetry gave way to the realist novel as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century England.
Nervous Reactions
Addresses how Victorian receptions of Romanticism and Romantic writers were shaped by notions of "nervousness. "
Romantic Science
Uncovers the vital role that new scientific discoveries played in Romantic literary culture.
Jane Austen and Co.
Examines recent Austen remakes as well as other “post-heritage” films and television shows to show how the past is reshaped for a contemporary market.
Imagined Londons
Explores the various representations and imaginations of London in literature and popular culture, from Victorian times to the present day.
Shakespeare's Political Realism
Explores the continuing relevance of important political themes in five of Shakespeare's English History plays.
Engagement and Indifference
Explores the hidden political and ethical dimensions of the work of Samuel Beckett, an author who might otherwise be considered indifferent to such considerations.
Chronicles of Disorder
Offers a striking new interpretation of Beckett's major fiction, demonstrating how his development as a writer was shaped by shifting twentieth-century ideas about the social function of literature.
Creating Safe Space
An anthology of literary essays focusing on the ways in which sexual, emotional, physical, racial, and other forms of violence have affected women artists' imaginations.
Blake's Nostos
Establishes Blake’s controversial, unfinished epic, The Four Zoas, as the culmination of his mythos.
Yeats and Alchemy
This book traces the development of alchemical discourse in the work of W. B. Yeats. His early essays and Golden Dawn transcripts demonstrate that for the poet, the alchemist was both artist and initiate. ...
The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life ...
Beyond Marginality
In a unique study of Anglo-Jewish writers in the post-war period, Dr. Sicher traces through their works the story of the rise of the Jewish community from slum poverty to suburban affluence. This period ...