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‘In a stimulating text rich with “alternate facts”, Carver reminds us that history is also what failed to happen and that each historical present carries with it its fantasies of alternate realities. The counterfactual has become a banality today, but this stimulating history of plural virtualities demonstrates how poetic our prosaic 19th century was in fact, and how productively it confronted its own unrealized possibilities.’ — Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University, USA ‘Ben Carver's lucid and insightful book reveals the spread of alternate-history speculation through a surprisingly wide range of nineteenth-century disciplines, genres, and national literatures. Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the century's historical imagination.’ — Catherine Gallagher, Eggers Professor of English Literature, Emerita, University of California, Berkeley, USA 'Ben Carver has produced a rich, wide-ranging and imaginative study of a neglected genre that has much to teach us about the nineteenth century and its characteristic modes of narrating the past, present and future. This is, in short, a valuable alternate history of Victorian historiography, as well as an original contribution to our understanding of the utopian imagination.' — Matthew Beaumont, Professor of English Literature, University College London, UK style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 12px;">This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and scenarios—referred to here as “alternate histories”—proliferated during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the (nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that “discovered” improved relations between men and women, and the use of alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship between the New World and the Old. The “untimely” imagination of other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth century.

Literature. --- Literature, Modern --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- 19th century. --- Alternative histories (Fiction) --- History and criticism. --- Alternate histories (Fiction) --- Fiction --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century.

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This book investigates what it is that makes John Clare’s poetic vision so unique, and asks how we use Clare for contemporary ends. It explores much of the criticism that has appeared in response to his life and work, and asks hard questions about the modes and motivations of critics and editors. Clare is increasingly regarded as having been an environmentalist long before the word appeared; this book investigates whether this ‘green’ rush to place him as a radical proto-ecologist does any disservice to his complex positions in relation to social class, work, agriculture, poverty and women. This book attempts to unlock Clare’s own theorisations and practices of what we might now call an ‘ecological consciousness’, and works out how his ‘ecocentric’ mode might relate to that of other Romantic poets. Finally, this book asks how we might treat Clare as our contemporary while still being attentive to the peculiarities of his unique historical circumstances. .

Pastoral poetry, English. --- Clare, John, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- English pastoral poetry --- English poetry --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Poetry. --- British literature. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- Poetry and Poetics. --- British and Irish Literature. --- Poems --- Poetry --- Verses (Poetry) --- Literature --- Philosophy --- Literature, Modern—19th century.

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This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century. .

Heroes in literature. --- English fiction --- History. --- English literature --- Literature, Modern-20th century. --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Twentieth-Century Literature. --- Contemporary Literature. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- Literature, Modern—20th century. --- Literature, Modern—21st century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century.

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This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as “tropical weather.” Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gisèle Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.

Literature. --- Comparative literature. --- Literature, Modern --- Comparative Literature. --- Postcolonial/World Literature. --- Twentieth-Century Literature. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- 19th century. --- 20th century. --- Weather --- Literature --- Comparative literature --- Literature, Comparative --- Philology --- Belles-lettres --- Western literature (Western countries) --- World literature --- Authors --- Authorship --- History and criticism --- Meteorology --- Literature   . --- Literature, Modern-20th century. --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Literature, Modern—20th century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century. --- World Literature.

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This book considers Keats’s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry’s rich allusiveness represents Keats’s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define his contemporary cultural politics. The book begins by discussing Keats’s Cockney traditionalism in its Regency context and then proceeds through the poet’s career in chronological order. There are chapters on history and vocation in the poet’s first volume, the failed idealism of 'Endymion', gender and audience in the Medieval Romances, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in historical context, secularism and consolation in the other great Odes, and then the two 'Hyperion' fragments, in which history ramifies beyond poetic method to become the explicit subject of inquiry. The result is a stimulating reassessment of Keats’s intellectual development and most admired poems. .

Literature. --- Literature, Modern --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- Eighteenth-Century Literature. --- 18th century. --- 19th century. --- Keats, John, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Kēts, Tzōn, --- Kits, Dzhon, --- Kʻichʻŭ, --- Literature, Modern-19th century. --- Literature, Modern-18th century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century. --- Literature, Modern—18th century. --- Literature