Like sex, Eileen Gillooly argues, humor has long been viewed as a repressed feature of nineteenth-century femininity. However, in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, Gillooly finds an understated, wryly amusing perspective that differs subtly but significantly in rhetoric, affect, and politics from traditional forms of comic expression. Gillooly shows how such humor became, for mostly female writers at the time, an unobtrusive and prudent means of expressing discontent with a culture that was ideologically committed to restricting female agency and identity. If the aggression and emotional distance of irony and satire mark them as "masculine," then for Gillooly, the passivity, indirection, and sympathy of the humor she discusses render it "feminine." She goes on to disclose how the humorous tactics employed by writers from Burney to Wharton persist in the work of Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

In recent years the analysis of the intersection of literature and economics has generated a vibrant conversation in literary and cultural studies of the Victorian period. But Aeron Hunt argues that an emphasis on abstraction and impersonality as the crucial features of the Victorian economic experience has led to a partial and ultimately misleading vision of Victorian business culture. In contrast, she asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls "personal business"—the social and interpersonal relationships of Victorian commercial life in which character was a central mediating concept. Juxtaposing novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant with such nonfiction works as popular biographies, periodicals, and business handbooks, the author builds on and extends the insights of the "new economic criticism" by highlighting the embodied, interpersonal, and socially embedded interactions of everyday economic life. Hunt analyzes the productive and disciplinary roles that character played in the Victorian economy and traces the proliferation of different models of character as literary writing and commercial discourse responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by personal business. She suggests that the dynamic interchange between forms of character employed in the everyday practice of business and those imagined in literary writing helped shape character as a crucial mode of power in Victorian business culture and economic life. Ultimately, Personal Business provides new ways to understand both the history of the Victorian novel and its implications in middle-class culture and the turbulent experience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

"This book will shake up your beliefs about what you are doing with your life so that you can finally push beyond everything that has been holding you back."Rodney Reider, Venture Capitalist & Former CEOFinally, a book about happiness that is uncomfortably honest about the real reasons so many people live life feeling dissatisfied about where they are compared to where they want to be. The author doesn't hold back in cutting straight into the root causes of discontent in life.For decades, authors, academics, and celebrities have pushed concepts such as positive thinking, meditation, morning rituals, and even nutritional supplements as the keys to happiness. They have talked about losing weight, becoming rich, and getting everything that you have ever wanted because these would be the things that would surely bring you a life of pure bliss. What they sold didn't work.This book is different. Instead of regurgitating the same concepts that have been covered over and over, this book offers a new perspective. It focuses on what causes misery in life instead of what causes happiness. By addressing the reasons that you might feel unhappy the author shows you how you can finally be happy. It is a masterful counter-intuitive guide to finding happiness in a world that has seemingly been designed to keep us running on a hamster wheel of discontent.

Contains articles which focus on a broad spectrum of significant figures in fiction, philosophy, and criticism such as Austen, Carlyle, Dickens,Thackeray, the Brontes, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James.