It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical fiction and serialized works.

It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical fiction and serialized works.

It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical fiction and serialized works.

It-narratives are prose fictions that take as their central characters animals or inanimate objects. This four-volume reset collection includes numerous examples of narratives in different forms, including short stories, excerpts from novels, periodical fiction and serialized works.

This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between authors and translators, from intra-European narratives of Grand Tour travel to scientific voyages round the world, and from established male travellers and translators to their historically less visible female counterparts. Drawing on European travel writing in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, the book charts how travelogues were selected for translation; how they were reworked to acquire new aesthetic, political, or gendered identities; and how they sometimes acquired a radically different character and content to meet the needs and expectations of an emergent international readership. The contributors address aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing in translation, drawing productively on other disciplines and research areas that encompass aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of the book.

The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.

This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day. Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research

While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. Yet, particularly British and Anglo-Irish literature display a long, albeit so far implicit tradition of texts that can be categorised as ‘thing-essays’: Starting with Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) and continuing until today, these texts draw broader insights from the contemplation of a material item of daily life. This book provides the first theoretical conceptualisation of this genre. Bringing elements from essay studies and the New Materialisms together, it shows why the essay lends itself particularly well to literarisations of the personal relationships that people foster to everyday objects. While the idiosyncrasies of each essay show the versatility of thing-essays, the study also seeks to unearth changing attitudes towards things – and thus towards people’s material surroundings in general – throughout time. In order to account for such synchronic and diachronic differences in thing-essays, this study develops a typology of three modes via which things can be approached essayistically. In the book’s second part, this framework will be employed in close readings and historicisations of 14 thing-essays from 1701 until 2021. Ranging from satire to sentimental writing, from religion to consumerism, from class to gender differences, from feelings of nationality to exoticism, from the French Revolution to Freud and from art to everyday life, the stylistic and thematic broadness of these thing-essays ultimately shows the multifarious connections between human life and materiality.

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.