Books published by University of Virginia Press

Decentreing the novel as the favoured form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the centre of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for celebrated midcentury novels.

Explores the idea of "primordialism" and reveals its consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American print culture in writers ranging from Washington Irving to Mark Twain.

Katherine Anne Porter's life (1890-1980) closely parallelled that of her century, not only in its span but in its interests and contradictions. She was a Communist sympathiser who later became quasi-fascist, a cosmopolitan who embraced Southern agrarianism, a femme fatale and a feminist.

A rare fox in the South American cordillera. A disappearing fox on an island off California. A common coyote in the Albany suburbs. How do these wild carnivores live? And what is it about the places they live that allows them to survive? Holly Menino joins up with three young scientists to find out.

A product of the "e;spiritual hothouse"e; of the Second Great Awakening, Spiritualism became the fastest growing religion in the nation during the 1850s, and one of the principal responses to the widespread perception that American society was descending into atomistic particularity. InBody and Soul, Robert Cox shows how Spiritualism sought to transform sympathy into social practice, arguing that each individual, living and dead, was poised within a nexus of affect, and through the active propagation of these sympathetic bonds, a new and coherent society would emerge. Phenomena such as spontaneous somnambulism and sympathetic communion with the dead-whether through sance or "e;spirit photography"e;-were ways of transcending the barriers dissecting the American body politic, including the ultimate barrier, death. Drawing equally upon social, occult, and physiological registers, Spiritualism created a unique "e;social physiology"e; in which mind was integrated into body and body into society, leading Spiritualists into earthly social reforms, such as women's rights and anti-slavery.From the beginning, however, Spiritualist political and social expression was far more diverse than has previously been recognized, encompassing distinctive proslavery and antiegalitarian strains, and in the wake of racial and political adjustments following the Civil War, the movement began to fracture. Cox traces the eventual dissolution of Spiritualism through the contradictions of its various regional and racial factions and through their increasingly circumscribed responses to a changing world. In the end, he concludes, the history of Spiritualism was written in the limits of sympathy, and not its limitless potential.Robert S. Cox is Curator of Manuscripts at the American Philosophical Society.

In Victorian Connections, each contributor was asked to write about anything in the Victorian period, with only one proviso: that the essay seek to draw connections with other disciplines, fields, periods, methodologies or authors. The compliment the essays pay to each other - the way they complement each other - lies in their diversity.

As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it.

Matthew Rowlinson has given us the most penetrating analysis of Tennyson's poetry to date. He proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading of Tennyson. In a series of original, scrupulously attentive, and sophisticated close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work.

Portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfil and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace.

This volume studies Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men. The author examines classical novels by female authors in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement.

Offers a fresh and stimulating exploration of Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world - with other men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment, and with the supernatural.

In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig aesthetic tradition.

Traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society.

Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection made Virginia's Southampton County notorious. Old Southampton links local and national history. It explains how partisan loyalties developed, how white democracy flourished in the late antebellum years, how secession sharply divided neighbourhoods, and how former slaves challenged the prerogatives of former slaveholders.

In a unique fusion of literary history and printing history, Allan C. Dooley explores the interactions between individual authors and their publishers and printers. He takes the reader through each stage of a work's development, illustrating how authors attempted to perfect and protect their writings from compositional manuscript through stereotyped reprints.

In this unconventional biography, Felicia Bonaparte proposes that there lived in "Mrs Gaskell" another, antithetical self, a daemonic double, that was not an angel in the house but instead a creature born to be a "gypsy-bachelor".

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Frederick Turner presents a new theory of aesthetics based on the argument that beauty is an objective reality in the universe. He identifies the experience of beauty as a pancultural, neurobiological phenomenon.

Emily Shore's journal is the unique self-representation of a prodigious young Victorian woman. From July 5, 1831 until June 24, 1839, two weeks before her death, she recorded her reactions to the world around her. She wrote of political issues, natural history, her progress as a scholar and scientist, and the worlds of art and literature.

Beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore, Fischler demonstrates how W.S. Gilbert made it his business to cater to the sensibilities of the middle class through the structure he imposed on his plots, the approach he took to characterization, and the treatment he accorded erotic love, the quintessential theme of comedy.

Offers a new approach to the study of instalment literature by showing how it embodied a view of life intrinsic to Victorian culture, and suggesting that for the Victorians the publishing format became an essential factor in creating meaning.

Joseph Conrad's major novels tell of illusions and betrayals, dreams and lies. Ambiguity, contradiction, and irony so dominate the narratives that the more closely one reads, the more difficult it becomes to know what is real or what is true. This perplexity, which is the binding force of Conrad's art, is thoroughly examined in Culture and Irony.