Frederick Garber studies in a wide range of English, French, German, and American literary texts instances of the struggle for the self's autonomy during the period preceding modernism. In tracing a pattern that changes from the unsettling of bourgeois conditions in Richardson to the collapse of that challenge in the Decadents, he demonstrates that this period is characterized by a pervasive dialectic of aloofness and association. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Frederick Garber takes up in detail several problems of the self broached in his previous book, The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton, 1982). Using patterns in Byron's canon as models, he focuses on the relations of self-making and text-making as a central Romantic issue. For Byron and many of his contemporaries, putting a text into the world meant putting a self there along with it, and it also meant that the difficulties of establishing the one inevitably reflect the parallel difficulties in the other. Professor Garber discusses some of Byron's key texts and shows how their development leads to an impasse involving both self and text. Byron's way out of these dilemmas was the mode of Romantic irony, of which he is one of the greatest exemplars. The study then moves into broader areas of Anglo-European literature, its ultimate purpose being to argue not only for the efficacy of such irony but for its position as something more than a mere alternative to Romantic organicism. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them. The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

General Manley Hopkins was not alone among Victorians in his attention to the human self and to the particularities of things in the world around him, where he savoured the ‘selving or ‘inscape’ of each individual existent. But the intensity of his interest in the self, as a focus of exuberant joy as well as sometimes of anguish, both in his poetry and his prose, marks him out as unique even among his contemporaries. In these studies Professor Ong explores some previously unexamined reasons for Hopkins’ uniqueness, including unsuspected connections between nineteenth-century sensibility and certain substructures of Christian belief. Hopkins was less interested in self-discovery or self-concept than in what might be called the confrontational or obtrusive self – the ‘I,’ ultimately nameless, that each person wakes up to in the morning to find simply there, directly or indirectly present in every moment of consciousness. Hopkins’ concern with the self grew out of a nineteenth-century sensibility which was to give birth to modernity and postmodernity, and which in his case as a Jesuit was especially nourished by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, concerned at root with the self, free choice, and free self-giving. It was also nourished by the Christian belief in the Three Persons in One God, central to Hopkins’ theology courses and personal speculation, and very notable in the Spiritual Exercises. Hopkins appropriated and intensified his Christian beliefs with new nineteenth-century awareness: he writes of the ‘selving’ in God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Hopkins’ pastoral work, particularly in the confessional, dealing directly with other selves in terms of their free decisions, also gave further force to his preoccupation with the self and freedom. ‘What I do,’ he writes, ‘is me.’ Besides being concerned with the self, the most particular of particulars and the paradigm of all sense of ‘presence,’ the Spiritual Exercises in many ways attend to other particularities with an insistence that has drawn lengthy and rather impassioned commentary from the postmodern literary theorist Roland Barthes. Hopkins’ distinctive and often precocious attention to the self and freedom puts him theologically far ahead of many of his fellow Catholics and other fellow Victorians, and gives him his permanent relevance to the modern and postmodern world.

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice. "Refreshingly, this impressive study of poetic form does not read the eighteenth century as a slow road to Romanticism, but fleshes out the period with surprising and important new detail."—Times Literary Supplement G. Gabrielle Starr is the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and a professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.

In 850 analytical articles, this two-volume set explores the developments that influenced the profound changes in thought and sensibility during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopedia provides readers with a clear, detailed, and accurate reference source on the literature, thought, music, and art of the period, demonstrating the rich interplay of international influences and cross-currents at work; and to explore the many issues raised by the very concepts of Romantic and Romanticism.

In this study of solitude in high modernist writing, Edward Engelberg explores the ways in which solitude functions thematically to shape meaning in literary works, as well as what solitude as a condition has contributed to the making of a trope. Selected novels are analyzed for the ambiguities that solitude injects into their meanings. The freedom of solitude also becomes a burden from which the protagonists seek liberation. Although such ambiguities about solitude exist from the Bible and the Ancients through the centuries following, they change within the context of time. The story of solitude in the twentieth century moves from the self's removal from society and retreat into nature to an extra-social position within which the self confronts itself. A chapter is devoted to the synoptic analysis of solitude in the West, with emphasis on the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and another chapter analyzes the ambiguities that set the stage for modernism: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Selected works by Woolf, Mann, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett highlight particular modernist issues of solitude and how their authors sought to resolve them.