Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"It's all here, everything, everything that has ever made someone laugh: Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python, sex, gas, dreams, ourang-outangs, the English, machines, mud, God, death, war, philosophy. In short: this is all but the last word on laughter – all but the last laugh, someone might say" — Professor John Schad, Lancaster University, UK "A provocative study of comic effects that are central to the reader's response yet overlooked by literary critics. Taylor's writing is both scholarly and entertaining, as he anatomises the links between laughter, cruelty and violence. His insights into the relationship between the hybridity of laughter and the generic hybridity of short story and memoir will be invaluable to scholars of both of these forms" — Professor Ailsa Cox, Edge Hill University, UK "Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 treats the relationship between laughter and violence, and between conflicting emotions and incongruous feelings. This scholarly captivating study reflects upon the “hybrid” nature of humour by using works penned by American and British writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield. Deftly moving between philosophy and literature, Jonathan Taylor tackles the ambivalent implications of comedy against the grain of standard approaches to the idea of “amusement”. This book engages with recent scholarship, but – at the same time – offers a different perspective to the relationship between the literary and the humoristic, presenting an extensive treatment of the subject in a period ranging from the nineteenth century to Modernism." — Saverio Tomaiuolo, Associate Professor of English Literature and Language, Cassino University, Italy.

Laughter in literature. --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- Literature, Modern—19th century.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This study presents Moby-Dick as a novel with three distinct but interconnecting stories: Ishmael’s, which he shares ten years after it has taken place; Ahab’s, which is Ishmael's account of the memorable captain of a whaling ship; and a third which centres on whales and whaling, which has not received significant critical attention. While each of these perspectives compete for prominence in the narrative, Ahab and Ishmael's stories have often distracted from the vital significance of the whaling narrative as what outlasts Ahab’s obsessive mission. Catalano rights this wrong by coming to a strikingly original and thought-provoking conclusion which becomes the heart of the book's argument: “the unity of Melville’s book comes, first, from the way the numerous literary, philosophical, and religious reflections are rooted in those magnificent beings, whales and in the men and ships that pursue them, and, second, in the way these reflections illuminate our own lives.” Joseph S. Catalono is professor emeritus of philosophy at Kean University, USA. Some of his previous publications include Thinking Matter: Consciousness From Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre (2000), Reading Sartre: An Invitation…(2010), and The Saint and the Atheist: Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre (2021).

Literature, Modern --- America --- Oceanography. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- North American Literature. --- Ocean Sciences. --- 19th century. --- Literatures.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

“Deftly combining the history of technology with literary analysis, White’s new book fascinatingly reveals the centrality of the steam engine to the British imperial imagination. A steam-powered tour de force of colonial literary history.” — Kate Teltscher, University of Roehampton, UK “White’s brilliant book explores futurist fictions published in the Bengal Annual and Romantic poetry side by side to dissolve the borders between metropolitan and colonial cultural production. His enviable range of references energises a discussion that encompasses activities, friendships, and writings that are fun to read about even today.” —Rosinka Chaudhuri, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India “In this well-written, well-researched, and fascinating account, White offers steam as a way to rethink parallel literary and scientific histories that have had significant consequences for colonialism and liberal thought. With characteristically revealing detail, White gives readers a new vision of empire as a place for techno-futurism and its cautious appraisal, contributing important lessons for our own age of buoyant invention. An unusual book, in the best way.” —James Mulholland, North Carolina State University, USA Considering metropolitan and colonial cultural production as a “unitary field of analysis,” this book shows how tensions in the 1830s between utilitarian and Romantic perspectives on steam power marked meaningful divisions within the pervasive liberal imperialism of the period and generated divergent speculative fantasies, set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, about the future of Indian nationalism. Poetry and fiction in Britain and Bengal engage with a Romantic strain of thought and sentiment according to which steam technology represents an anti-utilitarian humanization of nature. Within and against that frame and in uneven and different ways, writers in British India map a constellation of liberal values onto their hopes and fears concerning a future powered by steam. Daniel E. White is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2006) and From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–1835 (2013).

Literature, Modern --- Science --- Imperialism. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- History of Science. --- Imperialism and Colonialism. --- 19th century. --- History.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Romanticism and the Letter is a collection of essays that explore various aspects of letter writing in the Romantic period of British Literature. Although the correspondence of the Romantics constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right, it has received relatively little critical attention. Essays focus on the letters of major poets, including Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats; novelists and prose writers, including Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb; and lesser-known writers such as Melesina Trench and Mary Leadbeater. Moving from theories of letter writing, through the period’s diverse epistolary culture, to essays on individual writers, the collection opens new perspectives for students and scholars of the Romantic period. Madeleine Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Liverpool University Press published her first monograph, Shelley’s Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2017, and her book, The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley (2019) is published by Anthem Press. Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature at Birmingham City University. His publications include Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013), edited with Michael O’Neill. He is currently writing a monograph about literary letter writing in the British Romantic period.

English letters --- History and criticism. --- Literature, Modern—18th century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century. --- Eighteenth-Century Literature. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

popular culture --- victorian fiction --- nineteenth century literature --- popular fiction --- English fiction --- English fiction. --- History and criticism --- 1800-1899 --- English literature