Strange Fits Of Passion

A young and successful journalist working in New York, Maureen English appears to have the perfect life and family. But Maureen's husband, a highly respected fellow reporter, has in private a tendency towards alcohol and violent abuse. When the situation at home becomes intolerable, Maureen takes her baby daughter and flees. In a Maine fishing town she assumes a new identity and spends six weeks battling sub-zero temperatures, the intrusive glare of the townsfolk - and her fears of discovery. Against the force of the wintry sea- the cawing of the gulls, the lobstermen hauling their catch, the press of waves against the rocks - Maureen settles into the rhythms of a new life. Two married men pursue her, and one captures her heart. But this calming respite ends suddenly, leaving in its wake a murder, a rape charge, a suicide and a helpless child. Nearly nineteen years later, a cache of documents regarding Maureen English - abused, accused and imprisoned - are given to her daughter by the journalist who made her name reporting the case. The truth should lie within them, but the papers raise far more questions than they answer....

The introductory essay provides an overview of current issues and methodologies in gender theory, while the 11 essays in the book discuss novels and poems, from the seventeenth century to the present, by British, American, and French male writers who speak as, through, or like the feminine..

Seven professors of literature in Canadian universities contribute essays that examine English authors of the Romantic movement using historical, textual, and deconstructive methodologies. Studies of Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, are augmented by a review of recent scholarship. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

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New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man..

This book contends that when late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own. It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period’s obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience. The book shows how these epistemological dilemmas became gendered by studying a series of extravagantly affective scenes: Hume’s extraordinary confession of his own melancholy in the Treatise of Human Nature; Charlotte Smith’s insistence that she really feels the gloomy feelings portrayed in her Elegiac Sonnets; Wordsworth’s witnessing of a woman poet reading and weeping; tearful exchanges between fathers and daughters in the gothic novel; the climactic debate over the strengths of men’s and women’s feelings in Jane Austen’s Persuasion; and the poetic and public mourning of a dead princess in 1817..

Five essential and challenging essays by leading post-modern theorists on the art and nature of interpretation: Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller..

This book embodies a sequence of closely related essays which explore the modern poet's uneasy awareness of a tradition-the romantic tradition-with which he must contend. The author's premise is that the romantic age extends from The Divine Comedy through Wordsworth to Eliot. The roots of contemporary questions about the self and alienation are seen to extend at least as far back as Dante, who is the first poet to choose the ego as a focus for poetry of epic dimensions. In the course of the study Montgomery considers the growing emphasis upon the self's becoming the focus of poetry until this shift culminated in the literature of the most autobiographical century in western letters--the twentieth. Dante, Wordsworth, and Eliot are discussed at length, individually and in relation to one another, as principal instances of the reflective poet. The critic also considers other illustrative figures such as Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Pound, Joyce, and Hemingway. These and other writers have traveled along the romantic road anticipated by The Divine Comedy. Finally, the author suggests, the road may end in a labyrinth so far as the contemporary writer is concerned. In his increasing concern with the problems of the self and of the mind, the poet has been forced to invent new modes and techniques, which as the author demonstrates, grow out of his response to the psychological and metaphysical preoccupations of his age..

Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age..

Uncovering Wordsworth's influence on TennysonThis book explores Tennyson's poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson's borrowing of the earlier poet's words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson's poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised. Focusing on some of the most representative poems of Tennyson's career, including 'The Lady of Shalott', 'Ulysses' and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson's poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.Key FeaturesFirst book-length study of Tennyson's poetic relationship with WordsworthBy focusing on echoes or parallel passages, book reevaluates Tennyson's poetic relationship with Wordsworth Reveals Wordsworth as the lynchpin of Tennyson's poetryRecalibrates critical estimates of Tennyson as poet, Poet Laureate and Post-Romantic poet.

Eilenberg's subject is the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration found in the two writers' major work. During the period of their closest collaboration as well as at points later in their careers, Wordsworth and Coleridge took as their primary material the images of property and propriety upon which definitions of meaning and figuration have traditionally depended, grounding these images in writings about landed and spiritual property, material and intellectual theft, dispossession by banks and possession by demons. The writings and the politics generated by the literalization of such images can be read as allegorical of the structures and processes of signification. Each such gesture addresses in some way the fundamental question - who owns language, or who controls meaning?; Eilenberg's approach brings to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between two of the major figures of English Romanticism as well as fresh insight into what is at stake in the analogy between the verbal and the material or the literary and the economic..

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The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship..

This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture..

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This accessible collection of essays provides an essential introduction to the volume of poetry that defined British Romanticism..