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This book explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons from Victorian sociality, the book proposes a theory of communal care and a mode of critical reading centered on an ethics of care. In the Victorian era, medical science offered little hope for cure of illness or disability, and chronic invalidism and lengthy convalescences were common. Small communities might gather around afflicted individuals to minister to their needs and palliate their suffering. The book examines these groups in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Yonge, and studies the relationships that they exemplify. How do carers become part of the community? How do they negotiate status? How do caring emotions develop? And what does it mean to think of care as an activity rather than a feeling? Contrasting the Victorian emphasis on community and social structure with modern individualism and interiority, the book takes us closer to the worldview from which these novels emerged. It also considers the ways in which these models of carework could inform and improve practice in criticism, in teaching, and in our daily lives. Through the lens of care, the book discovers a vital form of communal relationship in the Victorian novel. It also demonstrates that literary criticism done well is the best care that scholars can give to texts.

The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. This book examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and other writers in the remarkable position of mediating the emergence of extraction-based life. The book looks at works like Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers, showing how the provincial realist novel's longstanding reliance on marriage and inheritance plots transforms against the backdrop of exhaustion to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. It explores how adventure stories like Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness reorient fictional space toward the resource frontier. And it shows how utopian and fantasy works like “Sultana's Dream,” The Time Machine, and The Hobbit offer imaginative ways of envisioning energy beyond extractivism. The book reveals how an era marked by violent mineral resource rushes gave rise to literary forms and genres that extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding.

In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth's reign. This book traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. The book uncovers the surprising associations early modern readers attached to rhyming forms like couplets and sonnets, and it shows how reading poetic form from a historical perspective yields fresh insights into verse's complexities. The book explores how early modern poets imagined rhyme as a band or fetter, comparing it to the bonds linking individuals to political, social, and religious communities. She considers how Edmund Spenser's sonnet rhymes stood as emblems of voluntary confinement, how John Donne's revival of the Chaucerian couplet signaled sexual and political radicalism, and how Ben Jonson's verse charted a middle way between licentious Elizabethan couplet poets and slavish sonneteers. The book then looks at why the royalist poets embraced the prerational charms of rhyme, and how Milton spent his career reckoning with rhyme's allures. Examining a poetic feature that sits between sound and sense, liberty and measure, the book elucidates early modern efforts to negotiate these forces in verse making and reading.

What is the use of fiction? This question preoccupied writers in the early United States, where many cultural authorities insisted that fiction reading would mislead readers about reality. This book argues that this suspicion made early American writers especially attuned to one of fiction's defining but often overlooked features—its fictionality. The book shows how these writers explored the unique types of speculative knowledge that fiction could create as they sought to harness different varieties of fiction for a range of social and political projects. Spanning the years 1789 to 1861, the book challenges the “rise of novel” narrative that has long dominated the study of American fiction by highlighting how many of the texts that have often been considered the earliest American novels actually defined themselves in contrast to the novel. Their writers developed self-consciously extranovelistic varieties of fiction, as they attempted to reform political discourse, shape women's behavior, reconstruct a national past, and advance social criticism. The book features original discussions of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known writers, including Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. By reframing the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing varieties of fiction, the book shows how these fictions structured American thinking about issues ranging from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery.

This book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. The book challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell—and what kind of hero Aeneas will be. The book shows how this contest is provoked by the transgressive goddess Juno, who challenges Vergil for the soul of his hero and poem. Her goal is to transform the poem into an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution instead of an Odyssey of successful homecoming. The book discusses how ancient critics considered the flexible Odysseus the model of a good leader but censured the hero of the Iliad, the intransigent Achilles, as a bad one. It describes how the battle over which kind of leader Aeneas will prove to be continues throughout the poem, and explores how this struggle reflects in very different ways on the ethical legitimacy of Rome's emperor, Caesar Augustus. By reframing the Aeneid in this way, the book demonstrates how the purpose of the poem is to confront the reader with an urgent decision between incompatible possibilities and provoke uncertainty about whether the poem is a celebration of Augustus or a melancholy reflection on the discontents of a troubled age.

For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” This book traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. The book goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. In doing so, it reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. The book describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. It reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

Stoic philosophers and Romantic writers might seem to have nothing in common: the ancient Stoics championed the elimination of emotion, and Romantic writers made a bold new case for expression, adopting “powerful feeling” as the bedrock of poetry. This book refutes this notion by demonstrating that Romantic-era writers devoted a surprising amount of attention to Stoicism and its dispassionate mandate. The book explores the subterranean but vital life of Stoic philosophy in British and American Romanticism, from William Wordsworth to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book shows that the Romantic era—the period most polemically invested in emotion as art's mainspring—was also captivated by the Stoic idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded the transcendence of emotion. The book argues that Stoicism was a central preoccupation in a world destabilized by the French Revolution. Creating a space for the skeptical evaluation of feeling and affect, Stoicism became the subject of poetic reflection, ethical inquiry, and political debate. The book examines Wordsworth's affinity with William Godwin's evolving philosophy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's attempt to embed Stoic reflection within the lyric itself, Lord Byron's depiction of Stoicism at the level of character, visions of a Stoic future in novels by Mary Shelley and Sarah Scott, and the Stoic foundations of Emerson's arguments for self-reliance and social reform.

In ancient Greek mythology, the lyrical songs of Orpheus charmed the gods, and compelled animals, rocks, and trees to obey his commands. This mythic power inspired Renaissance philosophers and poets as they attempted to discover the hidden powers of verbal eloquence. They wanted to know: How do words produce action? This book examines the key role the Orpheus story played in helping early modern writers and thinkers understand the mechanisms of rhetorical force. The book demonstrates that the forms and figures of ancient poetry indelibly shaped the principles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific knowledge. It explores how Ovid's version of the Orpheus myth gave English poets and natural philosophers the lexicon with which to explain language's ability to move individuals without physical contact. These writers and thinkers came to see eloquence as an aesthetic force capable of binding, drawing, softening, and scattering audiences. Bringing together a range of examples from drama, poetry, and philosophy, the book demonstrates that the fascination with Orpheus produced some of the most canonical literature of the age. Delving into the impact of ancient Greek thought and poetry in the early modern era, the book sheds light on how the powers of rhetoric became a focus of English thought and literature.