Literature & Gender Studies

Harriet Martineau wrote in the mid-nineteenth century when new disciplines and areas of knowledge were being established. Reflecting her prodigious achievements, this volume explores her influence on emerging fields such as economics, sociology, history, education, science, economics, childhood, the..

Lisa Fletcher moves the debate about the value and appeal of heterosexual romance onto new ground, testing the claims of speech-act and performativity theorists on everything from popular classics by Georgette Heyer, to 'bodice rippers,' to historical fiction by John Fowles and A. S. Byatt. Nominati..

Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. Examining key works by Robert Tressell, Alan Sillitoe, D.H. Lawrence, Bu..

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era..

Irishness and Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century British Writing..

This new selection of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle presents a complete view of a remarkable Victorian woman, with a wide circle of friends, who enjoyed the company of distinguished thinkers, writers, politicians, feminists, eccentrics and radicals. This edition draws on many remarkable letters ..

Exploring the literary microcosm inspired by Brontë's debut novel, Jane Eyre's Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad focuses on the nationalistic stakes of the mythic and fairytale paradigms that were incorporated into the heroic female bildungsroman tradition. She contrasts novels by women writers su..

Few facts are known about Catholic recusant Jane Owen. The title page of this, her only work, tells us that in 1634 when this volume was published at St Omer, she was already deceased. However, she was necessarily still living after 1617 when the treatise of Bellarmine, which she here partially tran..

As a transnational myth, Joan of Arc has served most contradictory causes. No other character has inspired a more impressive list of writers, but no other myth possesses the malleability required to serve rival camps. The quality of the exchanges between the best creative and philosophical minds of ..

An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus is Judith Man's English translation of a 1623 French work by Nicolas Coeffeteau, Histoire de Poliarque et d'Argenis, which is itself an abridgement and translation of one of the most widely read fictional works of the seventeenth century, Joh..

The sixth and last queen of Henry VIII, and friend of Anne Askew, Katherine Parr (c.1513-1548) has a threefold claim to recognition for her contribution to the literary culture of her time. First, as a loving and adept stepmother to the royal children, who took a directive role in their education; ..

Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. These works; which cover h..