19th Century

The Bildungsroman, or "novel of formation," has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal...

When the show was first produced in 1960, at a time when transatlantic musical theatre was dominated by American productions, Oliver! already stood out for its overt Englishness. But in writing Oliver!, librettist and composer Lionel Bart had to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781528718288Author Oscar WildeFormat PaperbackPage Count 52Imprint Read BooksPublisher Read BooksWeight(grams) 41gDimensions(mm) 152mm * 102mm * 3mm

Monsters and other supernatural malefactors disrupt the human world in distinct ways: werewolves and cunning beasts challenge the philosophical distinction between human and animal; demons offer deceptive pacts to prey upon our delusions of mastery over...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781849029728Author Edward LearFormat HardbackPage Count 410Imprint Benediction ClassicsPublisher Benediction ClassicsWeight(grams) 771gDimensions(mm) 229mm...

The first detailed account of Austen's characters' reading experience to date, this book explores both what her characters read and what their literary choices would have meant to Austen's own readership, both during her life and today. Jane Austen...

For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion's two-part structure presents forty-two essays on major topics, by...

Ecohorror represents human fears about the natural world-killer plants and animals, catastrophic weather events, and disquieting encounters with the nonhuman. Its portrayals of animals, the environment, and even scientists build on popular conceptions of...

An anthology of both familiar and previously unavailable primary texts that illuminate the world of nineteenth-century ideas. An expert team introduce and annotate a range of original social, cultural, political and historical documents necessary for...

Dion Boucicault was a witty, selfish and deceitful charmer, a bigamist, a profligate spendthrift and the author of dozens of successful plays, only a handful of which endure. Among these his early comedies influenced Oscar Wilde, and his Irish melodramas...

In Victorian England, Amelia B. Edwards was an iconic cultural figure, admired by Trollope and Browning for her best-selling fiction and by the wider public for her witty, thought-provoking travel writing. In later life, she became a celebrated...

Gogol's place in Russian literature is unique. He is Russia's classic comic writer, yet the phrase 'laughter through tears', which has been applied to him, hints at darker and more tragic overtones. One of the most idiosyncratic of writers, his influence...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776038Author John SutherlandFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint CONNELL PUBLISHING LTDPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

Autobiography of Mark Twain READER'S EDITION Now Available! Half the Size, All the Twain! ISBN 978052027255 "I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away--to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have...

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,...

As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English...

Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining...

The 1890s have become legendary: the period of Wilde, Beardsley and the Yellow Book; a decadent twilight at the close of the Victorian century, when young poets weary of life sat about drinking absinthe and talking of strange sins. The provenance of...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' - Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell set sail for Rome,...

This collection of essays covering many aspects of Austen's life, works and historical context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the life and times of Jane Austen. Jane Austen in Context is a generously illustrated collection of short,...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an...

From their acclaimed biographer, a final, powerful book about how Emerson, Thoreau, and William James forged resilience from devastating loss, changing the course of American thoughtIn Three Roads Back, Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial...

Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, after two years of writing The Life of...

Exploring the life and times of author Robert Louis Stevenson, The Proper Pirate takes readers on a psychological journey from the writer's clerical and constricted upbringing to a life of imagination and wonder culminating in the South Seas island of...

How well do you really know your favourite author? Ace literary detective turned quizmaster John Sutherland and Austen buff Deirdre Le Faye challenge the reader to find out. Starting with easy, factual questions that test how well you remember a novel...

In this book -- the first in more than fifty years to treat the entire body of Grimms' Tales -- Ruth B. Bottigheimer provides a thorough analysis of the stories' content, focusing in particular on the matter of gender. By combining a sociohistorical...

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a...

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean was known as the 'grave of Europeans'. At the apex of British colonialism in the region between 1764 and 1834, the rapid spread of disease amongst colonist, enslaved and indigenous populations...

This book is the first full-scale exploration of the fiction of one of the most influential women writing in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Lee's work was well-admired in her own day, her fiction and her writings on...

Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the...

Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity explores the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. From...

This book examines the Reading Room of the British Museum using documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary source. Roomscape explores a specific site - the Reading Room of the British Museum - as a space of imaginative potential in relation to...

Walter Benjamin holds a unique fascination for students and scholars interested in the question of modernity. The most original thinker of Weimar Germany, Benjamin has become something of a cultural icon and his works are often regarded with awe rather...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781873855249Author John Owen SmithFormat PaperbackPage Count 146Imprint John Owen SmithPublisher John Owen Smith

By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore's English language writings, this book places the work of India's greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore...

Mark Twain's complete, uncensored Autobiography was an instant bestseller when the first volume was published in 2010, on the centennial of the author's death, as he requested. Published to rave reviews, the Autobiography was hailed as the capstone of...

In the context of nineteenth-century Victorinoir and close readings of original-cycle film noir, Julie Grossman argues that the presence of the "femme fatale" figure, as she is understood in film criticism and popular culture, is drastically...

This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores...

Graham Robb has produced a masterpiece literary biography in which Balzac bursts into life on every page. The living manifestation of the colourful and varied world he described, yet at the same time its most astonishing exception, Balzac is the perfect...