The Busiest Man in England
The Busiest Man in England

Author: P. Morton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-04-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1403980993

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This book is a critical biography of Grant Allen, (1848-1899), the first for a century, based on all the surviving primary sources. Born in Kingston, Ontario, into a cultured and affluent family, Allen was educated in France and England. A mysterious marriage while he was an Oxford undergraduate wrecked his academic career and radicalized his views on sexual and marital questions, as did a three-year teaching stint in Jamaica. Despite his lifelong ill health and short life, Allen was a writer of extraordinary productivity and range. About half - more than 30 books and many hundreds of articles - reflects interests which ran from Darwinian biology to cultural travel guides. His prosperity, however, was underpinned by fiction; more than 30 novels, including The Woman Who Did , which has attracted much recent attention from feminist critics and historians. The Better End of Grub Street uses Allen's career to examine the role and status of the freelance author/journalist in the late-Victorian period. Allen's career delineates what it took to succeed in this notoriously tough profession.

Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism
Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

Author: Martin Lockerd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-06-25

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350137669

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Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Author: Thomas Hardy

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2005-02-24

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 019284069X

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Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbevilles, and meeting her "cousin" Alec proves to be her downfall. When Angel Clare offers her love and salvation, she must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.

The Woman Who Did
The Woman Who Did

Author: Grant Allen

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2004-06-25

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1770483349

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The controversial subject matter of Grant Allen's novel, The Woman Who Did, made it a major bestseller in 1895. It tells the story of Herminia Barton, a university-educated New Woman who, because of her belief that marriage oppresses women, refuses to marry her lover even though she shares his bed and bears his child. Her ideals come into disastrous conflict with intensely patriarchal late Victorian England. Indeed, Allen intended his novel to shock readers into a serious exploration of some of the major issues in fin de siècle sexual politics, issues that he himself, in various periodical articles under the rubric of the "Woman Question," had played a leading role in opening up to public debate. This Broadview edition contains a critical introduction as well as a rich selection of appendices which include excerpts from Allen's writings on women, sex, and marriage; contemporary writings on the "Sex Problem"; documents pertaining to the Marriage Debate; contemporary responses to the novel; and excerpts from two parodies of the novel.

Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings
Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings

Author: William Greenslade

Publisher: MHRA

Published: 2020-10-19

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 178188966X

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Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870-1896) made a critically significant contribution to the evolution of the modernist short story in Britain. His unexplained death in Paris at the age of 26 cut short a highly promising literary career. The striking realism of Crackanthorpe's first collection of short stories, Wreckage (1893), followed by the psychologically complex Sentimental Studies and posthumous Last Studies (1896), together with the prose poems of Vignettes (1896), were much admired by Henry James and his contemporaries, Dowson, Johnson and Symons, as the work of a leading, innovative writer of critical Decadence. Indeed his stories combine an unrelenting realism with a conscious aestheticizing of their often troubling, bleak subject matter. As co-editor of the short-lived periodical, The Albermarle and campaigning literary journalist, Crackanthorpe was a key critical participant in central literary and artistic debates of the early 1890s: 'facts' versus 'effects' in literature; the efficacy of realism/naturalism; questions of taste, 'reticence' and the handling of controversial subject matter. This fully annotated, critical text comprises the most extensive collection to date of Crackanthorpe's writing. As well as uncollected stories, the volume includes a short story never previously published in book form. This edition also contains a selection of Crackanthorpe's critical writings and a bibliographical survey of his work.