Bøger i Writers and Their Contexts serien

This book offers a radical rethinking of Jane Eyre from feminist and post-colonial positions.

The first book-length study of poet and political writer Violet Fane (Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie, n¿e Lamb, 1843-1905) recovers her work to a central position in the literary canon.

This new book vividly presents previously undiscovered biographical information about Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of Mary Barton, Cranford, The Life of Charlotte Bront¿, and Wives and Daughters. It also provides much contextual material about Harriet Martineau, the Bront¿ family and the history of Manchester.

There are histories of major publishing houses and biographies of major authors, but this is the only work that uses the publishing career of a respected and professional ‘mid-list’ author as a case study of this period of great change.George Gissing (1857-1903), author of a series of important novels, is best known for New Grub Street (1891), which concerns itself with the plight of an author of much talent but little success. It is a critically esteemed picture of publishing and the world of books at a time of dramatic transformations.Professor Nesta’s new work examines that “commerce”: the production, distribution, and economics of literature, and, perhaps most importantly from a human standpoint, the financial rewards of literature to the people who produced it, in relation to the life of one late Victorian author. His study will be of value to book historians, literary scholars interested in the Victorian period, those concerned with the historical economics of publishing, copyright, literary agents, advertising, Victorian serials, and circulating libraries. “The facts connected with the production and distribution of books, though little heeded by the public are, nevertheless, of great social and political, as well as literary importance.” So wrote John Chapman in the April 1852 Westminster Review article entitled ‘The Commerce of Literature’.The period from 1880 to 1900 saw tremendous changes in British publishing. When Dickens died in 1870 and when Gissing published his first novel in 1880 publishing was still following a set model of publishing three-volume novels for circulating libraries. There was then little or no use of literary agents, no American copyright protection for British authors, and the ‘norm’ for authors was outright sale of copyright instead of advances against royalties. By the time Gissing died in 1903 the basics of modern publishing were in place: international copyright agreements, complex contracts with foreign rights stipulated, the rise of literary agents, the death of the three-volume novel, the end of the dominance of circulating libraries, the use of typewriters and telephones and telegraph, and the growth of a larger reading public.

Ezra Pound - one of the most innovative and influential, if controversial, poets of the 20th century - continues to dominate the current literary landscape. / He was a key figure in helping to create what became ‘modernism’. Pound wrote poetry and criticism based on revolutionary aesthetic principles still relevant to our understanding of the arts today.  / This new work asks what are these principles and how did Pound develop them?  Who and what influenced him?  What beliefs enabled him not only to write poetry that remains challenging, intriguing and original, but also to recognize other writers and visual artists of distinction?  /   The author places Pound in the cultural context, examining how his early and wide ranging interests from antiquity to the contemporary shaped his aesthetic views. From his study and analysis of literature and art across cultures and centuries, Pound developed guiding principles for his own work and an enduring way of conceptualizing imaginative and lived experience.   /  Emerging from the cultural background of his immediate predecessors, the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists, Pound relied on his own understanding of particular writers from ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Italy as well as China, in order to discover techniques and themes he could adapt. He synthesized sources from East and West. The catchphrase “Make it New” associated with Pound’s modernism takes on a different light in the full context of his translation: “AS THE SUN MAKES IT NEW -- DAY BY DAY MAKE IT NEW.” His aesthetics thus present not a rejection of the past, but an ongoing vision for today. This is an original study which will be widely welcomed.