This volume guides students through Eliot's most widely studied novels: The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch. The first part of the book is based on analysis of extracts grouped by themes including relationships, society and morality. At the end of each chapter, a 'Methods' section offers ideas for independent study. The second part describes Eliot's biographical, cultural and intellectual environment, and gives readings of representative critical writing.
The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature.
In the twentieth century, Wordsworth has been subjected to a series of extensive critical reappraisals. With reference to a wide range of the poetry, Williams goes on to discuss the way Wordsworth has been variously reconstructed as a consequence of the main critical and theoretical initiatives of the last one hundred years. He also examines the Wordsworth we have inherited for the twenty-first century: a poet many still feel has important things to say to the contemporary reader about human relationships, nature, the environment, and our imaginative life.
Looking at the gothic in Victorian fiction, the development of cinema and Hitchcock's Vertigo , this book explores the contained or repressed desires of both characters and plots which defy direct representation, resulting in obsession, fetishism and displacement engendering a novel account of the way in which the gothic becomes internalized.
In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.
