A fascinating survey of Victorian literature from one of England's greatest minds Dishing out his signature brand of harsh wit, G. K. Chesterton casts a critical eye on the poets and novelists that defined the Victorian age in English literature. "Her imagination was sometimes superhuman - always inhuman," he writes of Emily Brontë. "Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle." Ranging from sharp denunciation to genuine admiration, Chesterton...

"A ... blend of literary history, lore, and early scientific exploration that traces the origins of the greatest horror story of all time"--Dust jacket flap.

"Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. The...

"It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it highest." ​ Carlyle ​ Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which we have agreed...

"The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical...

"Winner of the 2013 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, Robert Penn Warren Center and Western Kentucky University" "Co-Winner of the 2013 Sonia Rudikoff Prize, Northeast Victorian Studies Association" "Winner of the 2012 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association" Meredith Martin is associate professor of English at Princeton University. Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee?...

In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly...

"Winner of the 14th Annual (2012) Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University" "Co-winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association" "Co-Winner of the 2011 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012" Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2000" Karen Chase, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. She has also written a book-length critical study of Middlemarch. Michael Levenson is also Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study...