The Puritan Provincial Vision

This book suggests a new interpretation of the characteristic qualities of Scottish and American literatures. Professor Manning reveals the "puritan-provincial vision": a particular way of looking at life and man's relationship to what lies beyond himself.

This is a revisionist study of the literary and visual representation of the nation in the century following the formation of the British state. It argues that the most engaging accounts of Great Britain subject their imagery to sustained artistic pressure, threatening to dismantle the national vision at the moment of its construction.

This new collection of essays by major scholars in the field looks at the ways in which cross-fertilization has taken place in Gothic writing from France, Germany, Britain and America over the last 200 years, and argues that Gothic writing reflects international exchanges in theme and form.

In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society. London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

This book is a major step toward a fuller exploration of the connection between the visual arts and Williams' concept of the Modernist poem and of his achievement in transcending an art-for-art's-sake formalism to create poems that both reflect their own nature as a work of art and vividly evoke the world of which they are a part.

A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century British fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. While it is a truism that the period's literature is distinguished by its realism and air of probability, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder argues that wonder is integral to--rather than antithetical to--the developing techniques of novelistic fiction. Positioning its reader on the cusp between recognition and estrangement, between faith and doubt, modern fiction hinges upon wonder. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder's chapters unfold its new account of British fiction's rise through surprising new readings of classic early novels-from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey--as well as bringing to attention lesser known works, most notably Rudolf Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels. In this bold new account, the eighteenth century bears witness not to the world's disenchantment but rather to wonder's re-location from the supernatural realm to the empirical world, providing a re-evaluation not only of how we look back at the Enlightenment, but also of how we read today.

This book shows how Emily Dickinson used philosophy in her poetry and anticipated later philosophical movements.

Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America’s engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon’s career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon’s relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon’s complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.

A collection of essays discussing early American Indian authors.