Robert Browning, Joseph Conrad, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Home: E-books

Attempts to define Browning's understanding of the nature and use of words and syntax by considering a full range of his texts, the ideas important to him, his historical context, and the other artistic passions that played a part in his life.

"World Literature and Its Times helps students and researchers make connections between the political/social climate during which books were written and the works themselves. Each volume focuses on major fiction, poetry and nonfiction from a particular country or region, presenting approximately 50 works in detailed essays running approximately 10 pages. Future volumes will cover Italian, Russian, Jewish, Asian, French, Indian and German literatures.

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Martens analyses his work in relation to Romanticism and an evolving Victorian poetic culture. She goes beyond reductive interpretations of Browning as a self-effacing poet to reveal a highly self-conscious, self-dramatising and conflicted engagement with the Romantic tradition. Martens' Browning is a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study in voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

"Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible" charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bible s poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolution including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning came to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text. Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation. This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era. "Victorian Literature and Culture Series""

The study of language was central to the thinking of Tennyson and his circle of friends. The period of his education was a time of interest in the subject, as a new form of philology became widely known and accepted in Britain. In this study, Donald S. Hair discusses Tennyson's own view of language, and sets them in the context of the language theories of his day. The scope of the book is broad. Hair draws upon a wide range of Tennyson's poetry, from a quatrain he wrote at the age of eight to an 'anthem-speech' he wrote at the age of eighty-two, and pays particular attention to two major works: In Memoriam and Idylls of the King. He explores these in relation to the two theoretical traditions Tennyson inherited. One is derived from Locke and the language theory set out in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the other from Coleridge and the language theory of what Mill called the 'Germano-Coleridgian' tradition. He goes back to Plato's Cratylus and Aristotle's On Interpretation, and forward to the continental philology introduced into England by Tennyson's friends, Kemble and Trench, among others. Finally, he links Tennyson's language to thinkers such as Whewell, Hallam, and Maurice, who are not in themselves philologists but who make language part of their concerns--and Whewell was Tennyson's tutor, Hallam and Maurice his friends. Hair offers a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory in Britain while also providing some close readings of key passages of Tennyson's work and examinations of the poet's faith and views of society.

Tennyson shared the assumptions of his age concerning the value of family life, and treated the domestic as the source of the heroic in both action and character. This book provides a critical examination of these major Victorian themes as they appear in Tennyson's poetry.

Stateliest Measures demonstrates that Tennyson's engagement with the long-running and complex nineteenth-century debates concerning Hellenism, Imperialism, and modern British culture was much more profound than his critics have recognized.

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at allignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such formsof attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively, the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

By making his argument about In Memoriam a continuous argument for it, Timothy Peltason brings to light a wider appreciation of its greatness and of its central place in the history of modern poetry. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. He sought very early on to develop a 'writing of the voice' based on oral or communal modes of storytelling. Greaney argues that the 'yarns' of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of this voice-centred aesthetic. But Conrad's suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote. The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism. Greaney offers an examination of a wide range of Conrad's work which combines recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.

For one hundred years, Heart of Darkness has been among the most widely read and taught novels in the English language. Hailed as an incisive indictment of European imperialism in Africa upon its publication in 1899, more recently it has been repeatedly denounced as racist and imperialist. Peter Firchow counters these claims, and his carefully argued response allows the charges of Conrad's alleged bias to be evaluated as objectively as possible. He begins by contrasting the meanings of race, racism, and imperialism in Conrad's day to those of our own time. Firchow then argues that Heart of Darkness is a novel rather than a sociological treatise; only in relation to its aesthetic significance can real social and intellectual-historical meaning be established. Envisioning Africa responds in detail to negative interpretations of the novel by revealing what they distort, misconstrue, or fail to take into account. Firchow uses a framework of imagology to examine how national, ethnic, and racial images are portrayed in the text, differentiating the idea of a national stereotype from that of national character. He believes that what Conrad saw personally in Africa should not be confused with the Africa he describes in the novel; Heart of Darkness is instead an envisioning and a revisioning of Conrad's experiences in the medium of fiction.

Cobley's close readings of modernist British fiction by writers as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster identify characters whose attitudes and behaviour patterns indirectly manifest cultural anxieties that can be traced to the conflicted logic of efficiency.