British Literature

The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.

Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally Greene

The story of “Shakespeare’s sister” that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of One’s Own has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way. But Woolf’s engagement with the Renaissance went deeper than that question indicates, as important as it was.

With Gissing in Italy
The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

A candid portrait of one of England's most celebrated authors In 1897, at age nineteen, American Brian Ború Dunne was an aspiring journalist, who chanced to meet the Englishman George Gissing at the height of his career as a novelist. He was somewhat awed, but not unduly intimidated, by the renowned writer, and his vigorous personality drew Gissing into many frank and unguarded conversations.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
· Edited by Susan Crowl and Roma A. King Jr.

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture. Robert Browning wrote Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day in his seventy-third year.

Ruskin’s Mythic Queen
Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture
By Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

John Ruskin's prominence as the author of “Of Queen's Gardens,” his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division. Here, Ruskin creates a vision of feminine authority that draws simultaneously upon several sources (including the goddess Athena and Queen Victoria herself) to empower women in a worldwide arena redefined as a broader version of their domestic realm.

Shakespeare in Production
Whose History?
By H. R. Coursen

Shakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a “photoplay” if its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a “popular” film discussed in the context of comedy as a genre.

Dared & Done
The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
By Julia Markus

Based extensively on their writings and letters to each other, this chronicle of Elizabeth Barrett's and Robert Browning's life together stands in bold relief against the backdrop of their Victorian world. Their passionate partnership overcame any number of obstacles — Elizabeth's role in her father's family; her illness; her Creole background; Robert's tentative career — to culminate in a marriage of mutual devotion.

Detection and Its Designs
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
By Peter Thoms

Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 9
1902–1903
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

This ninth volume concludes the widely-acclaimed edition of The Collected Letters of George Gissing, which not only renders obsolete all other collections and selections of his letters, but also contains a considerable quantity of hitherto unpublished or inaccessible materials.

Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984-94
By Barry Roth

This, Professor Roth’s third annotated bibliography of studies on Jane Austen, covers the years 1984–1994. Like the critically acclaimed earlier volumes, it charts the steady growth and enrichment of literary criticism of Austen in the second half of the twentieth century. The first bibliography, which covered the period 1952–1972, contained 794 items; the second, which treated 1973–1983, included over 1,060 pieces; this third work has 1,327 entries.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume VI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
· Edited by Allan C. and Susan E. Dooley and John Berkey

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 8
1900–1902
By George Gissing
· Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre Coustillas

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. In the following years a good number were published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible.

Robert Browning’s Rondures Brave
By Michael Bright

Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi says that we may pass things a hundred times and never see them. One thing that Browning’s readers have passed without seeing, or at least without remarking upon, is the circular conclusion in so many of his poems. Some sixty poems (almost a third of them) have such conclusions. These sixty span his entire career and include both well-known and neglected poems.

Romanticism and the Anglican Newman
By David Goslee

Goslee’s study maintains that Newman’s Anglican writing, although widely considered irrelevant to the main currents of the post-Enlightenment, in fact reinterprets Romantic transcendence within a uniquely dialogic paradigm. It is this paradigm, he argues, that critics need to explore as a link between sacred and secular domains within Victorian culture. Goslee’s own exploration is accomplished in three parts.

Sight Unseen
Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio
By Elissa S. Guralnick

In Sight Unseen radio drama, a genre traditionally dismissed as popular culture, is celebrated as high art. The radio plays discussed here range from the conventional (John Arden’s Pearl) to the docudramatic (David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement), from the curtly conversational (Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache) to the virtually operatic (Robert Ferguson’s Transfigured Night), testifying to radio drama’s variety and literary stature.