{"title":"Victorian Literature And Culture Series","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the Victorian era with this insightful series. Explore the social, political, and cultural landscape of 19th-century Britain through the eyes of leading scholars. Perfect for history enthusiasts and literature lovers alike.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"modified-rapture-book-alan-fischler-9780813913346","title":"Modified Rapture","description":"The professional success achieved by W. S. Gilbert was unique in nineteenth-century English theater: he was the first dramatist ever to be knighted for his stage works, which yielded him a fortune that his less prosperous playwriting predecessors could scarcely have imagined. The Savoy operas-so called after the theater at which most of them were originally produced-were comedies. But comedy, in its traditional form, was hardly congenial to the prevailing social prejudices of the Victorian age: it features the triumph of rebelliousness over laws and rules, ridicules the keepers of the established order, and celebrates the victory of the erotic instinct over repression. Spectacles of this kind were especially uncomfortable for the newly arrived middle class, intent on making itself conspicuous for its dedication to respectability and duty. In fact, before Gilbert's Savoy productions, many of the bourgeoisie refused altogether to patronize the English stage, where the dominant form was comedy in its various guises. Beginning with H. M. S. Pinafore, Fischler demonstrates how Gilbert made it his business to cater to the sensibilities of the middle class through the structure he imposed on his plots, the approach he took to characterization, and the treatment he accorded erotic love, the quintessential theme of comedy. The book's conclusions not only illuminate Gilbert's own comic practice but point the way toward a new understanding of the transactions between comedy in general and the spirit of the Victorian age.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49542549733649,"sku":"GOR004750404","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52427787829521,"sku":"NLS9780813913346","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813913349.jpg?v=1751362786"},{"product_id":"victorian-publishing-and-mrs-gaskell-s-work-book-linda-k-hughes-9780813918754","title":"Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work","description":"For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention - the loyal wife, good mother, and respected writer - a reputation that led to her steady decline in the view of twentieth-century literary critics. Recent scholars, however, have begun to recognize that Mrs. Gaskell's high standing in Victorian society allowed her to effect change in conventional ideology. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund focus this reevaluation on issues pertaining to the Victorian literary marketplace.  Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfill and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace. While she wrote for money, producing periodical fiction, major novels, and nonfiction, Mrs. Gaskell was able to maintain a tone of warmth and empathy that allowed her to imagine multiple social and epistemological alternatives. Writing from within the established rubrics of gender, narrative, and publication format, she nevertheless performed important cultural work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49562786464017,"sku":"GOR009464318","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52426658119953,"sku":"NLS9780813918754","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813918758.jpg?v=1763219916"},{"product_id":"romance-of-the-harem-book-anna-leonowens-9780813913285","title":"The Romance of the Harem","description":"From setting foot in Asia in 1849 (or was it 1845?) as Anna Crawford (or was it Anna Edwards?) to waltzing with Yul Brynner in glorious technicolor, Anna Leonowens and her romanticized experiences as the only Westerner behind the walls of Nang Harm (the walled harem of the king of Siam) have had a long, colourful, and often controversial existence. Reproduced here is the original 1873 edition of \"The Romance of the Harem\" by Anna Leonowens (long out of print) which was the source for a 20th century book \"Anna and the King of Siam\" known to us all through Rogers and Hammerstein's \"The King and I\". \"Why\", asks Susan Morgan in her provocative introduction, \"should we read this obscure travel account, with its dubious and often inaccurate or uncheckable facts and its author of shady repute?\" For several reasons: first, the narrative speaks in its unique way to three of the most incendiary issues in 19th century England and America - imperialism, slavery and women's rights. Further, \"Romance\" is the only inside story ever written by a Westerner of life behind harem walls in 19th-century Thailand. Every morning for more than 5 years, Anna Leonowens took her young son by the hand and walked into an isolated community of 9000 women and children. And finally, when accepted as fictionalized history, Anna Leonowens's dramatic stories about some of the women in that harem take a prominent place on the growing shelf of rediscovered 19th century women's travel narratives. This book is an addition to women's studies programs, Asian studies, literature and history courses. It should also fascinate general readers with a taste for exotic cultures and settings.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49566300111121,"sku":"GOR004034094","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52142312489233,"sku":"NLS9780813913285","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53437775511825,"sku":"CIN0813913284G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813913284.jpg?v=1751011177"},{"product_id":"promises-broken-book-ginger-s-frost-9780813916101","title":"Promises Broken","description":"In the nineteenth century, a woman who could prove a man had broken his promise to marry her was legally entitled to compensation for damages. Bridging the gap between history and literature, Ginger S. Frost offers an in-depth examination of these breaches of promise and compares actual with fictional cases. Althought the most important factor in determining the outcome of such trials was gender, class was also vital in assessing the suitability of mates. Promises Broken highlights the courtship practices of lower- and middle- class Victorians, a group much neglected in previous scholarship.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49568676086033,"sku":"GOR007638953","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52426634526993,"sku":"NLS9780813916101","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813916100.jpg?v=1750979712"},{"product_id":"gypsy-bachelor-of-manchester-book-felicia-bonaparte-9780813913902","title":"The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester","description":"Despite feminist reassessments to the contrary, the conventional view that Elizabeth Gaskell personified the Victorian feminine ideal is still very much in place today. Challenging that view in an experimental biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there lived in \"\"Mrs. Gaskell\"\" another, antithetical self, a daemonic double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature born to be a \"\"gypsy-bachelor.\"\" Bonaparte does not dispute that \"\"Mrs. Gaskell\"\" did exist, but she suggests that Gaskell conceived her, as much as any fictional character, out of a desperate need produced by her childhood experience of rejection and abandonment, in order to gain the love of friends and family and the approval of the world. Gaskell herself, Bonaparte argues, told the story of her double in images encoded in her letters, fiction, and life. Using the methods of literary criticism for biographical ends, Bonaparte traces a pattern of these images, showing how a metaphor that may turn up as a figure of speech in one of Gaskell's letters may be embodied in a character in one of her short stories, dramatized in an incident or plot in one of her novels, and even actualized in an action or a relationship in her life. To reach the inner woman, Bonaparte claims, it is necessary to \"\"read\"\" Gaskell's letters, fiction, and life as a single poetic text. In addition to presenting a radically different interpretation both of Gaskell and of her literary work, Bonaparte's unique approach opens up interesting possibilities in a number of other areas: in the writing of biography, in the analysis of metaphor in the nineteenth-century novel, in the study of the relationship between literature and life, in the exploration of links between the inner and outer self, and in women's studies generally.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49655098867985,"sku":"GOR007954537","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52427737530641,"sku":"NLS9780813913902","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081391390X.jpg?v=1751329404"},{"product_id":"language-of-flowers-book-beverly-seaton-9780813929422","title":"The Language of Flowers","description":"The author traces the phenomenon of ascribing sentimental meaning to floral imagery from its beginnings in Napoleonic France through its later transformations in England and America. At the heart of the book is a depiction of what the three most important flower books from each of the countries divulge about the period and the respective cultures. Seaton shows that the language of flowers was not a single and universally understood correlation of flowers to meanings that men and women used to communicate in matters of love and romance. The language differs from book to book, country to country. To place the language of flowers in social and literary perspective, the author examines the nineteenth-century uses of flowers in everyday life and in ceremonies and rituals and provides a brief history of floral symbolism. She also discusses the sentimental flower book, a genre especially intended for female readers. Two especially valuable features of the book are its table of correlations of flowers and their meanings from different sourcebooks and its complete bibliography of language of flower titles. This book will appeal not only to scholars in Victorian studies and women's studies but also to art historians, book collectors, museum curators, historians of horticulture, and anyone interested in nineteenth-century popular culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49916684239121,"sku":"CIN0813929423G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52427448516881,"sku":"NLS9780813929422","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53396496711953,"sku":"CIN0813929423VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813929423.jpg?v=1751201598"},{"product_id":"child-the-state-and-the-victorian-novel-book-laura-c-berry-9780813929293","title":"The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel","description":"The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as \"\"childhood\"\" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society.  Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. 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Angela Leighton not only discusses the work of neglected poets such as Augusta Webster and \"\"Michael Field,\"\" but also charts the development of women's poetry from sentimentalism of Hemans and L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) to the various strategies of self-displacement employed by the best of the Victorians, especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.  Combining biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, Angela Leighton offers a reinterpretation not only of some original and intriguing literature, but also of the very canon of Victorian poetry. Impressive in scope and highly original in its aims, this study will serve as the main critical work in this area for many years to come.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50273963147537,"sku":"CIN0813914272G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53597861380369,"sku":"GOR007109051","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813914272.jpg?v=1751107546"},{"product_id":"rubaiyat-of-omar-khayyam-book-edward-fitzgerald-9780813916897","title":"Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam","description":"FitzGerald's translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was compulsively revised and as such there are four published editions. This critical edition publishes all extant states of the poem with a record of its textual evolution. Biographical notes trace the history of the poem and its author.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363004780817,"sku":"CIN0813916895G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53107610485009,"sku":"GOR010872269","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813916895.jpg?v=1750914952"},{"product_id":"idol-of-suburbia-book-annette-federico-9780813919157","title":"Idol of Suburbia","description":"Marie Corelli was the most popular novelist of the turn of the 20th century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs Humphrey Ward, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For 30 years she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite, but these opinions had no impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, she broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel sold 100,000 copies a year. This text seeks to return Corelli to conversations about the late-Victorian and Edwardian literary world. As Annette R. Federico points out, Corelli's participation in the cultural life of her time was highly creative, combative and contradictory. Her ongoing war with highbrow literary critics and her management of her own image illuminate continuing debates about literary value, class hegemony and gender politics at the fin de siecle. In examining Corelli's celebrity and her protean literary talents in the context of a changing book market, Federico reveals the profusion of the late-Victorian literary imagination. She analyzes Corelli's participation in literary decadence, feminism, and New Woman fiction, and she discusses how seriously we should take her aesthetic and its literary influence. Federico asks why heterosexual love seems pathological in so many of Corelli's novels and assesses the validity of biographical and psychoanalytic explanations of her celibacy and her lifelong companionship with another woman.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363061502225,"sku":"CIN0813919150G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813919150.jpg?v=1763483603"},{"product_id":"rubaiyat-of-omar-khayyam-book-edward-fitzgerald-9780813927251","title":"Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam","description":"Edward FitzGerald's translation of the \"\"Rubaiyat\"\" of Omar Khayyam, perhaps the most frequently read Victorian poem and certainly one of the most popular poems in the English language, poses formidable challenges to an editor. FitzGerald compulsively revised his work, alternately swayed by friends' advice, importuned by his publisher's commercial interests, and encouraged by public acclaim. In consequence, the editor is faced with four published editions as well as manuscript and proof versions of the poem. Christopher Decker's critical edition of the \"\"Rubaiyat\"\" is the first to publish all extant states of the poem and to unearth a full record of its complicated textual evolution.Decker supplies a rich interpretive context for the \"\"Rubaiyat\"\" that reveals how its composition was so often a collaborative enterprise. His view of poetic creativity comprehends recent theories of the sociology of texts and challenges the common assumption that the desired product of a critical edition is a single unified text of a literary work. He illuminates the complex process of revision by providing a textual appendix in which a comparative printing lays down each stratum of FitzGerald's composition. Biographical and textual introductions, making imaginative use of FitzGerald's correspondence, trace the history of the poem and pay special attention to FitzGerald's motives for revising, for creating a variously beautiful work in verse.This definitive edition of the \"\"Rubaiyat\"\" will be of special interest to scholars and students of Victorian poetry, publishing history, verse translation, literary imitation, and revision. And readers for whom the poem is an old acquaintance will here find fresh ways to appreciate its strengths and finesse.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50500858642705,"sku":"CIN0813927250G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50570802954513,"sku":"GOR008237431","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53611507548433,"sku":"NLS9780813927251","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813927250.jpg?v=1780394943"},{"product_id":"strangers-in-the-archive-book-heidi-kaufman-9780813947372","title":"Strangers in the Archive","description":"The scene of some of Londons poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50520240357649,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50520240980241,"sku":"GOR013983507","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813947375.jpg?v=1763481251"},{"product_id":"letters-of-christina-rossetti-book-christina-rossetti-9780813923178","title":"The Letters of Christina Rossetti","description":"Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets - not just one of the major women poets - of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, four volumes, makes available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been published. These letters come from over one hundred private and institutional collections, scattered from Scotland to Australia. The fourth and final volume of the Letters covers the last eight years of Christina Rossetti's life. In 1887 Rossetti, at the age of fifty-six, was living with her two aged, ailing aunts. In addition to managing the household and nursing her aunts, she published an enlarged edition of her collected poems and, in 1892, wrote her greatest book of devotional prose, The Face of the Deep. 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Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.        Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. 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Wishing to create a respectable reputation for itself while also functioning as a profitable business, the industry was engaged in a struggle that required the appeasement of both the regulator and the consumer. 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Using an interdisciplinary method grounded in close readings of specific texts and archival materials, and drawing on science studies, philosophy, object theories, and cultural history,  The Physics of Possibility interprets innovations across different forms of writing, tracing a trajectory from a handful of mathematically -minded savants in 1850 to a shared understanding of fiction as a vehicle devoted to the production of possible worlds.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50925686685969,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50925687472401,"sku":"CIN0813941458G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51797150761233,"sku":"CIN0813941458VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813941458.jpg?v=1763479838"},{"product_id":"confessing-the-flesh-book-lesley-higgins-9780813953205","title":"Confessing the Flesh","description":"A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priest  Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the celebrated Victorian-era poet and Catholic priest. 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Reynold's Mysteries of London. Richard Maxwell argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives, the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities. The city dwellers' drive to interpret linked the great metropolises with the discourses of literature and art (the primary vehicles of allegory). Dominant among allegorical figures were labyrinths, panoramas, crowds, and paperwork, and it was thought that to understand a figure was to understand the city with which it was linked. Novelists such as Hugo and Dickens had a special flair for using such figures to clarify the nature of the city. Maxwell draws from an array of disciplines, ideas, and contexts. His approach to the nature and evolution of the mysteries genre includes examinations of allegorical theory, journalistic practice, the conventions of scientific inquiry, popular psychiatry, illustration, and modernized wonder tales (such as Victorian adaptations of the Arabian Nights). 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