This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as NeoVictorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.
By Miriam Borham-Puyal
January 16, 2020
This book explores the concept of liminality in the representation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, as well as in contemporary rewritings, such as novels, films, television shows, videogames, and graphic novels. In particular, the volume focuses on vampires, prostitutes, ...
By Robert Archambeau
January 16, 2020
W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world. This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as ...
Edited
By Maria Bachman, Albert Pionke
September 30, 2019
At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing ...
Edited
By Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-Čapková, Mirjam Hinrikus
July 11, 2019
Nordic Literature of Decadence fills a gap on the map of world literature and participates in a thriving area of research by extending the investigation of broadly understood fin de siècle decadence to unexplored areas of Nordic literature, which remain practically unknown to Anglophone audiences. ...
By James Martell
July 04, 2019
Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing ...
By Joseph Willis
June 04, 2019
The impact of the Cold War on German male identities can be seen in the nation’s cinematic search for a masculine paradigm that rejected the fate-centered value system of its National- Socialist past while also recognizing that German males once again had become victims of fate and fatalism, but ...
By Adrian S. Wisnicki
March 21, 2019
Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature; it is a project of recovery. The book argues ...
Edited
By Jane Ford, Alexandra Gray
February 05, 2019
Popular novelist, female aesthete, Victorian radical and proto-modernist, Lucas Malet (Mary St. Leger Harrison, 1852-1931) was one of the most successful writers of her day, yet few of her remarkable novels remain in print. Malet was a daughter of the ‘broad church’ priest and well-known Victorian...
By Jordan Kistler
January 17, 2019
Arthur O'Shaughnessy's career as a natural historian in the British Museum, and his consequent preoccupation with the role of work in his life, provides the context with which to reexamine his contributions to Victorian poetry. O'Shaughnessy's engagement with aestheticism, socialism, and Darwinian ...
By Milena Radeva-Costello
December 13, 2018
Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature explores the relationship between British literature and philanthropy at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the works of E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, W. B. Yeats, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, ...
By Jessica Durgan
December 11, 2018
As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman ...
Edited
By Lizzie McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, Rebecca Soares
July 26, 2018
For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the status quo, but also a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the gendered psyche’s links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These dynamic ...