Scribner launches a new literature reference source with this volume, accompaniment to its well-established British Writers series. While that series focus on writers, the new one concentrates on works. The first volume contains extensive essays on 20 literary classics in various genres, selected after researching the curriculum and consulting with professors. Although many of the choices are unsurprising, others are not typically given to beginning students of literature, reflecting the fact that the new series is intended for a somewhat advanced audience.
The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics
Mikhail Bakhtin and the group of thinkers known as the Bakhtin Circle have had a massive influence on contemporary literary and cultural theory. This is the first book to bring together this significant new research on the Circle, setting it within a historical and intellectual context and emphasising the importance of the work of the Circle as a whole. Craig Brandist offers a new look at the significance of Bakhtin's legacy, and brings into clearer focus the contribution of others in the circle...
The architectural designs of Batty Langley greatly influenced England's Gothic Revival movement in the second half of the eighteenth century. This volume (beautifully engraved by his brother Thomas), which completely reproduces the author's most famous and influential work, displays columns, entablatures, windows, mantels, pavilions, and a host of other architectural features.
Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain
Dangerous Motherhood is the first study of the close and complex relationship between mental disorder and childbirth. Exploring the relationship between women, their families and their doctors reveals how explanations for the onset of puerperal insanity were drawn from a broad set of moral, social and environmental frameworks, rather than being bound to ideas that women as a whole were likely to be vulnerable to mental illness.
Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other -- as the un-Romantic mode. This book argues instead that the two modes mutually defined each other and were subtly interwoven during the Romantic period. By rearranging reputations, changing aesthetic assumptions, and re-distributing cultural capital, the interaction of satiric and Romantic modes helped make possible the Victorian and modern construction of "English Romanticism."
