British Literature

Curtain Calls
British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820
Edited by Mary A. Schofield and Cecilia Macheski

“I here and there o’heard a Coxcomb cry, Ah, rot—’tis a Woman’s Comedy.”Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow—and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines—women truly took the theater world by storm.For each woman who chose a career in the theater world of the eighteenth century, there is a unique tale of struggle, insult, success, good or bad fortune, disaster, seduction, or fame.

Aurora Leigh
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
· Edited by Margaret Reynolds

Widely regarded as Barrett Browning’s major work, Aurora Leigh is important both for its address to contemporary social issues, the “woman question” in particular, and for its bold experimentation with poetic form. Since 1979 it has held its place in the canon as “the feminist poem” (Ellen Moers), yet, until now, no reliable edition of the work has been available.The

The Collected Letters of George Gissing Volume 1
1863–1880
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published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible.

Victorian Will
By John Robert Reed

John R. Reed, author of Victorian Conventions, The Natural History of H.G. Wells, and Decadent Style, has published a new critical study examining nineteenth-century British attitudes toward free will, determinism, providence, and fate. His new book, Victorian Will, argues for the need to understand a body of literature in its broadest historical and intellectual context.

Pompilia
A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning’s The Ring and The Book
By Ann P. Brady

When Count Guido Franceschini was tried by a Roman court in 1698 for the rape and murder of his young wife Pompilia, he had the church, the state, and “all of sensible Rome” supporting him. Their cynical mandate sprang from the traditional belief that in a patriarchal society the male should wield absolute power, including the power of life and death, over the female.

The Enemy Opposite
The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis
By SueEllen Campbell

Among modernist critics Wyndham Lewis stands out because of the energy and drama of his “aggressive partisan pen—made to hurl epithets, or of the sort to use, in controversy, as a dangerous polemical lance.” With this pen Lewis created the Enemy, a flamboyant, hostile, solitary figure whose voice and stance vividly embodied the principles structuring his criticism. The frontiers of this criticism—the Enemy criticism—are best marked by the comments of his two long-time friends, T.S.

The Manyfacèd Glass
Tennyson’s Dramatic Monologues
By Linda K. Hughes

The hazy settings and amorphous auditors of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues are often contrasted—at Tennyson’s expense—with Browning’s more vivid, concrete realizations. Hughes argues that Tennyson’s achievements in the genre are, in fact, considerable, that his influence can be traced in such major figures as T. S. Eliot, and that the monologue occupies a far more central position in Tennyson’s poetic achievement than has hitherto been acknowledged.Hughes’

Fetter’d or Free?
British Women Novelists, 1670-1815
Edited by Mary A. Schofield and Cecilia Macheski

Traditional literary theory holds that women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century produced works of limited range and value: simple tales of domestic conflict, seduction, and romance. Bringing a broad range of methodologies (historical, textual, post-structuralist, psychological) to bear on the works of Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and others. Fetter’d or Free?

Victorian Conventions
By John Robert Reed

The Literary Guide and Companion to Southern England
By Robert M. Cooper

In a series of intriguing routes through the English countryside, Professor Robert Cooper notes those attractions that the casual tourist might unknowingly pass by, such as the house where Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, or the windswept quay where John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s woman walked.

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

Alberta Alone
By Cora Sandel
· Translation by Elizabeth Rokkan

Cora Sandel, born Sara Fabricus in 1880, did not publish her first novel until 1926. Alberta and Jacob, first novel of the trilogy, is the story of an adolescent girl’s rebellion against the self–conscious gentility of her family in the far north of Norway during the last years of the nineteenth century. Imaginative and intelligent, Alberta Selmer longs for the knowledge and self fulfillment that her provincial surroundings cannot give her.

The Natural History of H. G. Wells
By John Robert Reed

This new study offers a general reassessment of H. G. Wells as a writer and thinker. It concentrates upon the close relationship between Wells’ developing philosophy and his literary techniques. The early chapters examine Wells’ treatment of such subjects as confinement and escape, sex, the nature of human identity, the relationship of individual to race, human progress, and the importance of education.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume V
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Roma A. King Jr., Allan C. Dooley, Harry Krynicky, and Donald Smalley

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.Volume V contains: A Soul’s Tragedy Poems Christmas-Eve and Easter Day Essay on Shelley Men and Women, Vol.

Shakespeare’s Typological Satire
Study of Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem
By Alice-Lyle Scoufos

Shakespeare created a new and vibrant satire in his history plays by inverting the medieval mode of typology and applying it to old chronicle materials to make his historical characters “types” of the Elizabethans who were alive in England in his own day. Shakespeare’s Typological Satire is a detailed study of historical materials which lie behind the most famous and involved of these lampoons: the Falstaff-Oldcastle crux in the Henry IV plays.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume IV
Edited by Roma A. King Jr., Thomas Wilson, Park Honan, Raymond E. Fitch, and Morse Peckham

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.Volume

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume III
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
· Edited by Roma A. King Jr., Morse Peckham, Park Honan, Donald Smalley, and John Hulsman

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.Volume

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume II
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
· Edited by Roma A. King Jr., Gordon Pitts, 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.Volume II contains Browning’s play, Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837), and the long poem, Sordello (1840).

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume I
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
· Edited by Roma A. King Jr., John Berkey, and Morse Peckham

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.