What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

In this study, Frederick Burwick probes the origins - philosophical, aesthetic and literary - of developing subjectivist mimesis in the literature and theory of the Romantic period. He draws on the theories of Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Thomas De Quincey, and others.

A family saga spanning 200 years. The catch is that most of the relatives remain on the scene throughout this whole time period, or show up again by the end. This remarkable feat is accomplished through cryogenics, the science of freezing a person in liquid nitrogen shortly before death, with the hope of resurrection at some later date. Ben Smith, born in 1925, marries his high school sweetheart, fathers four children, and becomes an advocate of cryogenics.

Shakespeare's critics have often claimed that plays such as The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Coriolanus allegorize the ways in which class conflict influences the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England. Revisionist historians have argued, however, that the rise of capitalism was more often conditioned by the unintended consequences of social policy, rather than by polarized class positions. This study uses revisionist historical accounts of the transitional period in order to offer a new methodology for understanding the representation of social and economic change in Shakespearean drama.