Category Archives: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

By | September 22, 2023

One of the main challenges when approaching Dickinson is navigating the gigantic body of criticism which is out there. My own work on Dickinson has taken me through the different stages where this is crucial – from being a student and postgraduate researcher, to an author and University lecturer. When thinking about writing about or… Read More »

Reading Baudelaire With Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence

By | September 13, 2023

To speak of Baudelaire is to speak of paradox and contradiction.  It is to speak of a poet who is modern, amodern, and antimodern, one who vaunts transcendent correspondences and lets his poet’s halo remain trapped in the mud of the urban street.  Baudelaire’s works defy any attempt characterize them except by way of a… Read More »

Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women

By | May 24, 2023

Guest post by Marion Sherwood The Tennyson women were Alfred Tennyson’s forebears – the poet’s paternal grandmother, Mary Tennyson (1753-1825), her daughters Elizabeth Russell (1776-1865) and Mary Bourne (1777-1864), and her daughter-in-law Frances Tennyson, later Tennyson d’Eyncourt (1787-1878). The women were an inseparable and influential part of the poet’s early life until he left Lincolnshire… Read More »

A-Z of Jane Austen

By | November 21, 2022

Much of The A-Z of Jane Austen pays attention to what you might call the ‘surface’ of Austen’s writings – to activities such as dance or matchmaking, for example, whose centrality in her storylines might seem to go without saying. In so doing I’m making the case that readings of Austen don’t necessarily have to… Read More »

Haiti’s Literary Legacies

By | March 22, 2022

Interview with Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White How would you describe your book in one sentence? KK & DEW: Our book gathers together essays that examine the impact of the Haitian Revolution on romantic-era writing—European, North American, and Haitian – and how those writings, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, registered and responded to events… Read More »

Response to Masami Sugimori’s “Weak Theory, ‘Responsible’ Reading and Literature Criticism”

By | January 12, 2022

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. In this guest post by Daniel Aureliano Newman, he responds to Masami Sugimori’s chapter on Weak Theory, “Responsible” Reading, and Literary Criticism.

Response to Daniel Newman

By | January 11, 2022

This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Yan Tang Daniel Newman’s essay deftly moves from a generative reading of postcritique that calls for alternatives to Theory’s reductive tendency, to responsible reading as a pedagogy of sharing our myriad experiences… Read More »

Charles Dickens in Europe – Five Things You May Not Know

By | August 22, 2013

We're very excited here at the Bloomsbury office to have received our rather beautiful printed copies of the magnificent two-volume Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Edited by Michael Hollington and a must for any University Library, this book brings together nearly fifty international contributors to provide a comprehensive survey of Charles Dickens's reception throughout… Read More »

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

By | November 21, 2012

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set… Read More »

Dracula in Criticism

By | November 8, 2012

Dracula has attracted the attention of a remarkable breadth of critical and theoretical approaches over the past 50 years. These range from the most orthodox of 1970s Freudian interpretations to the acerbic historicist rejections of psychoanalysis characteristic of the 1990s, and encompass the intellectual shifts that have blurred the boundaries between feminism and gender studies,… Read More »