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Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable yearOscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be. Key features: * First study to explore how early modern republican and contemporary radical thought connect with and complement each other * Traces the presence of English republicanism from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth * Analyses Renaissance literary texts in the context of classical, early modern, and contemporary political thought to add to how we think about selfhood in the present * Offers illuminating new readings of the place that English Renaissance figures occupy in histories of friendship, the public sphere, and selfhood more generally

Traces authors' attitudes toward US economic expansionism through their fictional allusions to internationally-traded commodities Offering an interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, Consuming Empire assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain and wheat, Consuming Empire reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, Consuming Empire considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures and artists as self-aware acknowledgements of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own. Heather Wayne is a teacher of English and independent scholar living in Massachusetts. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century US literature, material culture, feminism, visual culture, empire and global history.

Renews our understanding of Shakespeare through an interdisciplinary focus on hospitality In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare's plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy and anthropology, as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds. The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive Shakespeare's plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees. Sophie E. Battell is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Zurich.

The first volume devoted to Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the visual arts Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but arguably he was also keen to address and (re)write an art history of which, paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean 'too' was/is 'capable'. Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writing, drawings and paintings with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics, and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture. Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex. Her publications include On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015; 2018), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009) and The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001).

[headline]Rethinks the relationship between architecture, literature and (in)visibility in the nineteenth-century city Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period. [bio]Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is the author of Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 (2023) and Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal. His work has appeared in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in various handbooks and edited collections.

[headline]Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and nature At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place. [bio]Louis Kirk McAuley has been Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington State University, USA, since 2014. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and is the author of Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740-1800 (2013).