The English literary tradition has been constituted as a patriarchal family. Great fathers are supposed to pass on a place to worthy sons, and the status of women's writing within the canon is contested. This book shows how kinship and mentoring relationships between writers helped to form the national tradition. Writers featured include Dryden, Congreve, Johnson, Burney, the Fieldings, the Wordsworths, and Austen.
This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.
This book is a study of Anglo-Scottish literary relations in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It attempts to show how those poets who have frequently been called 'Scottish Chaucerians' (James I, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas) drew upon English writing. In the best Middle Scots poetry we see an order of invention and technical mastery that is comparable with that of Chaucer's work, and this is sometimes accompanied by shrewd commentary on Chaucer's art. Evidence of such an independent and critical view of Chaucer is strikingly absent in contemporary English poetry, and the book accounts for some of the differences between Northern and Southern poetry in the later Middle Ages. Above all, this study reveals that the poetry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century in Scotland is a rich and extremely varied body of literature, ranging from the carefully wrought philosophical comedy of 'The Kingis Quair' to the tragic grandeur of Henryson's 'The Testament of Cresseid', from the pointed satires and grotesqueries of Dunbar to Douglas' vigorous and sensitive translation of the Aeneid.
Using a wealth of diverse source material this book comprises an innovative critical study which, for the first time, examines Scott through the filter of his female contemporaries. It not only provides thought-provoking ideas about their handling of, for example, the love-plot, but also produces a different, more sombre Scott.
The first comprehensive look at how Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis shaped each other Novel Relations engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. For Christoff, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Christoff shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The first book to examine at length the connections between British psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Novel Relations describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.
Arguing for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within transamerican and multilingual contexts, Anna Brickhouse examines a broad array of texts in English, French, and Spanish. She discovers literary influences from Latin American and Caribbean American literatures which made the period a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.
