(Paperback)

This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradi

(Hardback)

Explores the links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. This book shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing.

(Paperback)

Links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world.

(Paperback)

Explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. This book covers Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the "Aeneid" itself, Camoes's "Lusiadas", Tasso's "Gerusalemme liberata") and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty.

(Hardback)

Examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. This book argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars.

(Paperback)

The English Revolution was a revolution in reading, with over 22,000 pamphlets exploding from the presses between 1640 and 1661. What this phenomenon meant to the political life of the nation is the subject of Sharon Achinsteins book. Considering a wide range of writers, from John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Lilburne, John Cleveland, and William Pr

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectual history and political mythology. This book examines how thinkers on the right and left repudiated regicide and terror, while articulating a compassionate, humanitarian vision, which became the moral basis for the modern French nation. It focuses on the fluidity of political myths.

(Paperback, Expanded Edition)

One of the most influential works on Sir Walter Scott, The Hero of the Waverley Novels is a model for reconstructing ideas common at a given period in time. In this book Alexander Welsh draws upon the entire canon of Scott's fiction to demonstrate its bearing on property and the behavior prescribed for the propertied classes. Analyzing the "passive

(Hardback)

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. This book explores how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865.

(Paperback)

'Vital Signs' offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. It also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.