‘An Empire in Men’s Hearts:’ The Liberal Conquest of Spanish America
in Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826
February 2010; published online March 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 12673 words.
This introductory chapter discusses the interest eighteenth-century readers had on Spanish America, starting with Britain's relations with the emerging ‘informal empire’ in Spanish America. It then...
The Anglophile Academy
in Anglophilia
July 2008; published online February 2013.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 32734 words.
This chapter considers the importance of Anglophilia to college life in the nineteenth century and to the academic mystique that it sustains. Why has intellectual and university culture...
Anglophilia
July 2008; published online February 2013.
Book. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 434 pages.
This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of...
The Author-Cat
November 2007; published online September 2011.
Book. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 272 pages.
At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished...
Autobiography As Epistemology
in Dying to Know
September 2002; published online February 2013.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 8876 words.
This chapter closely explores Charles Darwin's Autobiography. The very qualities that mark the autobiographies of Darwin, Anthony Trollope, and John Stuart Mill as unliterary can be read as...
Beautiful Democracy
September 2007; published online February 2013.
Book. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 272 pages.
The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that...
Beauty Along the Color Line: Lynching, Form, and Aesthetics
in Beautiful Democracy
September 2007; published online February 2013.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 12092 words.
W. E. B. Du Bois's interest in aesthetics speaks volumes about how specific content—particularly African Americans—often fails to meet putatively universal criteria that underwrite justice....
Benefits and Blessings Letters Home, Friendship, Death Notices, Courtship, and Valentines by Penny Post
in Posting It
October 2009; published online September 2011.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 16563 words.
This chapter considers beneficial types of communication that one can trace to the Victorian letter-writing boom following postal reform. Staying connected with friends and relatives across the new...
“Beyond Hope, Help, or Remedy”: Confession, Cure, and the Hypochondriac's Narrative
in Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
May 2004; published online February 2013.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 21224 words.
This chapter explores the use that invalid authors made of the confessional mode and studies how its conventions aided their self-fashioning as particular kinds of patients. Edward...
Biographilia
in Victoriana - Histories, Fictions, Criticism
February 2007; published online March 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: literary studies (19th century). 22243 words.
This chapter studies the currently rising profile of Victorian literary biography. It takes a look at how life writing removed the writer's privilege to be an important witness to the significance...