English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding. Its focus, however, was still strongly local, not national. This study examines in detail the literary production from the capital before, during, and after the time of the Black Death. In this major contribution to the field, Ralph Hanna charts the development and the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing.

Readings of Jane Austen tend to be polarised: she is seen either as conformist - the prevalent view - or quietly subversive. In "General Consent in Jane Austen", Barbara Seeber overcomes this critical stalemate, arguing that general consent does not exist as a given in Austen's texts.

To what extent did Charles Dickens see himself as a medium of forces beyond his conscious control? What did he think such subconscious mechanisms might be, and how did his thoughts on the subject play out in his writings?  Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens traces these questions through three Dickens novels: Oliver Twist , Dombey and Son , and Bleak House .  It is the first book-length study to approach Dickensian psychology from the vantage point of what the speculations of Dickens’s—rather than of our own—had to say about mental phenomena, both normal and abnormal.

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumass, and Angela Carter were embarked on their own revisionist project to breathe new life into fairy tales and classical myths based on traditional gender roles.

Virgil Made English traces Virgil’s fate from the Interregnum through mid-eighteenth-century England and beyond by examining translations, imitations, adaptations, and discussions of the poet and some of his fellow Ancients. Along the way, it examines English and French neoclassical theorists, demonstrating the unacknowledged gap between theory and practice in this period. The central argument here concerns the decline in influence and authority of Virgil and the Ancients in this “neoclassical” period.