Francis O'Gorman – författare

'The fact is, Mark, that you and I cannot conceive the depth of fraud in such a man as that.'The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril. His patroness, the proud and demanding Lady Lufton, is offended and the romantic hopes of Mark's sister Lucy, courted by Lady Lufton's son, are in jeopardy. Pride and ambition are set against love and integrity in a novel that has remained one of Trollope's most popular stories.Set against ecclesiastical events in the Barchester diocese and informed by British political instability after the Crimean War, Trollope's fourth Barchester novel was his first major success. A compelling history of uncertain futures, Framley Parsonage is a vivid exploration of emotional and geographical displacement that grew out of Trollope's own experiences as he returned to England from Ireland in 1859. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.''It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness.The Way We Live Now is usually thought Trollope''s major work of satire but is better described as his most substantial exploration of a form of crime fiction, where the crimes are both literal and moral. It is a text preoccupied by detection and the unmasking of swindlers. As such it is a narrative of exceptional tension: a novel of rumour, gossip, and misjudgment, where every second counts. For many of Trollope''s characters, calamity and exposure are just around the corner.

''Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.''It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness.The Way We Live Now is usually thought Trollope''s major work of satire but is better described as his most substantial exploration of a form of crime fiction, where the crimes are both literal and moral. It is a text preoccupied by detection and the unmasking of swindlers. As such it is a narrative of exceptional tension: a novel of rumour, gossip, and misjudgment, where every second counts. For many of Trollope''s characters, calamity and exposure are just around the corner.

Victorian Britain offered to the globe an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism - currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation - from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literarycritics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers'' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. Victorian Literature and Finance is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships betweenliterary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. These essays move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to businesstheory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, Victorian Literature and Finance sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in thenineteenth century.

''I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything.'' The Duke of Omnium is overwhelmed by the death of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora. Once the British Prime Minister, he is now in sole charge of his three wilful children. Lord Gerald has been sent down from University; Lord Silverbridge has defected from the Liberal cause of his father''s party to the Conservative, and is badly in debt; Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a commoner with a will of iron but no money. The Duke, troubled and without easy relationships with any of his children, tries to impose his own will. But the result seems to move the novel towards calamity. Searching the great topics of compromise and principle, of obedience and dissent, of personal integrity and the conflicts between generations, The Duke''s Children is a domestic story with far-reaching political issues at stake. It is a fitting end to the Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything.'' The Duke of Omnium is overwhelmed by the death of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora. Once the British Prime Minister, he is now in sole charge of his three wilful children. Lord Gerald has been sent down from University; Lord Silverbridge has defected from the Liberal cause of his father''s party to the Conservative, and is badly in debt; Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a commoner with a will of iron but no money. The Duke, troubled and without easy relationships with any of his children, tries to impose his own will. But the result seems to move the novel towards calamity. Searching the great topics of compromise and principle, of obedience and dissent, of personal integrity and the conflicts between generations, The Duke''s Children is a domestic story with far-reaching political issues at stake. It is a fitting end to the Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.'' John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin''s incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin''s intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.'' John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin''s incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin''s intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''He''s spoilt my life,- he''s spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth''The compelling story of an ordinary girl''s tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia''s Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell''s last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the ever-present threat of press-gangs, the story darkens when Sylvia''s father is roused into vengeful violence. But this trouble proves only the precursor to a greater calamity that will radically alter Sylvia''s future.Gaskell''s novel, richly engaging with the legacy of the Brontë sisters, is her most extensive literary exploration of the tragic depths of unregarded, unhistoric, but vividly imagined lives. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''He''s spoilt my life,- he''s spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth''The compelling story of an ordinary girl''s tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia''s Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell''s last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the ever-present threat of press-gangs, the story darkens when Sylvia''s father is roused into vengeful violence. But this trouble proves only the precursor to a greater calamity that will radically alter Sylvia''s future.Gaskell''s novel, richly engaging with the legacy of the Brontë sisters, is her most extensive literary exploration of the tragic depths of unregarded, unhistoric, but vividly imagined lives. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''The fact is, Mark, that you and I cannot conceive the depth of fraud in such a man as that.''The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril. His patroness, the proud and demanding Lady Lufton, is offended and the romantic hopes of Mark''s sister Lucy, courted by Lady Lufton''s son, are in jeopardy. Pride and ambition are set against love and integrity in a novel that has remained one of Trollope''s most popular stories.Set against ecclesiastical events in the Barchester diocese and informed by British political instability after the Crimean War, Trollope''s fourth Barchester novel was his first major success. A compelling history of uncertain futures, Framley Parsonage is a vivid exploration of emotional and geographical displacement that grew out of Trollope''s own experiences as he returned to England from Ireland in 1859. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

''The fact is, Mark, that you and I cannot conceive the depth of fraud in such a man as that.''The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril. His patroness, the proud and demanding Lady Lufton, is offended and the romantic hopes of Mark''s sister Lucy, courted by Lady Lufton''s son, are in jeopardy. Pride and ambition are set against love and integrity in a novel that has remained one of Trollope''s most popular stories.Set against ecclesiastical events in the Barchester diocese and informed by British political instability after the Crimean War, Trollope''s fourth Barchester novel was his first major success. A compelling history of uncertain futures, Framley Parsonage is a vivid exploration of emotional and geographical displacement that grew out of Trollope''s own experiences as he returned to England from Ireland in 1859. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

There was a power of endurance about her, and a courage that was almost awful. Did Lady Mason forge a codicil to her husband''s will, allowing Orley Farm to pass to her son or not? Orley Farm centres on this case of forgery, and the anguish and guilt of Lady Mason. Surrounding this enigmatic woman and her apparent crime are her elderly lover, Sir Peregrine Orme; her principled but thoughtless son, Lucius; and, not least, a group of determined lawyers. Orley Farm contains the plot with which Trollope was most pleased. Drawing on family experience of the loss of an inheritance, the novel tackles the tremendous question of property fraud. The result, as George Orwell observed, is one of the most brilliant novels about a law suit in English fiction. Orley Farm dates from a confident period of its authorâs life. It breathes an air of writerly assurance, with Trollope at the height of his competitiveness with Dickens. In this work Trollope claims the Victorian legal novel as his own.

There was a power of endurance about her, and a courage that was almost awful. Did Lady Mason forge a codicil to her husband''s will, allowing Orley Farm to pass to her son or not? Orley Farm centres on this case of forgery, and the anguish and guilt of Lady Mason. Surrounding this enigmatic woman and her apparent crime are her elderly lover, Sir Peregrine Orme; her principled but thoughtless son, Lucius; and, not least, a group of determined lawyers. Orley Farm contains the plot with which Trollope was most pleased. Drawing on family experience of the loss of an inheritance, the novel tackles the tremendous question of property fraud. The result, as George Orwell observed, is one of the most brilliant novels about a law suit in English fiction. Orley Farm dates from a confident period of its authorâs life. It breathes an air of writerly assurance, with Trollope at the height of his competitiveness with Dickens. In this work Trollope claims the Victorian legal novel as his own.

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel''s drawer?A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins''s novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that growsimaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel''s drawer?A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins''s novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that growsimaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

'For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.'John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin's incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin's intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.'It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness.The Way We Live Now is usually thought Trollope's major work of satire but is better described as his most substantial exploration of a form of crime fiction, where the crimes are both literal and moral. It is a text preoccupied by detection and the unmasking of swindlers. As such it is a narrative of exceptional tension: a novel of rumour, gossip, and misjudgment, where every second counts. For many of Trollope's characters, calamity and exposure are just around the corner.

Edward Thomas is a key figure in the English literary canon. A major twentieth-century poet, he was also one of England's most experienced and respected Edwardian and Georgian critics, and an exceptional observer of the countryside. Although he died at the age of only 39, his prose output was considerable and encompassed a wide range of genres: biography, autobiography, essays, reviews, fiction, nature books, travel writings, and anthologies. While Thomas's stature as a poet is widely appreciated, his prose works have yet to be given their critical due -- in large part because scholarly editions have hitherto been lacking. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition shows that Thomas's prose deserves to be much better known by literary scholars but also the general reading public. This six-volume edition establishes him as one of the most important prose writers in English, who contributed remarkable ideas and representations of the self and community, the landscape and ecology, literature and history, the spiritual and artistic life. It is the definitive edition of Thomas's prose and a significant scholarly resource for the twenty-first century.Volume V is dedicated to Edward Thomas's work in literary criticism. Known as a diverse and prolific reviewer of literature, including of modern poetry, Thomas also wrote a significant number of broadly critical studies at book length. These books helped alter his established reputation as a nature writer, and included studies of Lefcadio Hearn, Maurice Maeterlinck, and of Keats. Volume 5 reproduces the two most important of his works in criticism: Thomas's Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Study (1912) and Walter Pater: A Study (1913). These are important texts in the last few years of Thomas's career as a prose writer, in which obliquely he assesses his own relationship with prose and with creative language, analysing via two other writers what were some of the largest challenges for his authorship. Presented as an evaluation of two major Victorian writers, the two books are best understood as self-examination. And they are also, as the Introduction argues, telling versions of Thomas's 'unlived lives': in assessing both Swinburne and Pater, Thomas contemplates lives that he had not himself led. The books are suffused with his own dismay, self-criticism, longing, and desire. They are unmissable steps on Thomas the poet's way to discovering that prose was not the best literary form for his self-expression. Fully annotated, this edition draws widely on the surviving manuscripts of these two works to present a unique insight into Thomas at work, finding the physical traces in the manuscript record of the very troubles he was claiming true of two other writers. The edition also adds further literary material, including reviews and an early Paterian short-story by Thomas to indicate something of his debts -- sometimes despite his protestations -- to authors of the previous generation.

There was a power of endurance about her, and a courage that was almost awful.Did Lady Mason forge a codicil to her husband's will, allowing Orley Farm to pass to her son or not? Orley Farm centres on this case of forgery, and the anguish and guilt of Lady Mason. Surrounding this enigmatic woman and her apparent crime are her elderly lover, Sir Peregrine Orme; her principled but thoughtless son, Lucius; and, not least, a group of determined lawyers. Orley Farm contains the plot with which Trollope was most pleased. Drawing on family experience of the loss of an inheritance, the novel tackles the tremendous question of property fraud. The result, as George Orwell observed, is one of the most brilliant novels about a law suit in English fiction. Orley Farm dates from a confident period of its authorâs life. It breathes an air of writerly assurance, with Trollope at the height of his competitiveness with Dickens. In this work Trollope claims the Victorian legal novel as his own.

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). This authoritative edition presents students with a new, more complete, more challenging, but also more credible Swinburne than ever before. This edition presents the first rigorous scholarly edition of a substantial selection of Swinburne's work ever produced. Swinburne was one of the most brilliant and controversial poets of the nineteenth century: a republican; a scorner of established Christianity; a writer of sexual daring; a poet of loss and of love. Yet he is also the most misunderstood poet of the Victorian period. This new edition, with substantial editorial material, presents a new and convincing portrait of a man sharply different from what is usually said of him. Beginning with his unpublished 'Ode to Mazzini' (1857) and ending with his last major critical work on The Age of Shakespeare (1908), this edition offers Swinburne in the round--a man of astonishing consistency whose formal innovations and critical penetration remain persistently engaging as well as provocative. A major introduction explores Swinburne's complicated reaction to the scandal of his first major collection, Poems and Ballads (1866); his life-long commitment to radical voices (Blake, Hugo, Landor, Shelley); his permanent hostility to tyranny; his sense of literature as a living form and of the heroic personality of the artist; his dazzling art criticism and adroit analysis of Renaissance and modern literature; his exceptional elegies for dead friends; his burlesques and richly atmospheric fiction and drama. The edition draws on rich contemporary sources, manuscripts, and the diverse print culture of Swinburne's day, as well as moving through ancient and modern languages that Swinburne wrote with fluency.Explanatory notes and commentary are included to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life of Swinburne.

Emily Brontë is one of the few modern writers in English whose distinction as a novelist is matched by her distinction as a poet. She lived and died more or less completely out of the public eye and only towards the end of the nineteenth century was her writing widely recognized. Wuthering Heights (1847) and the small but vital corpus of poetry have subsequently become some of the most celebrated writing in nineteenth-century literature. This new edition in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents Emily Brontë's work as it was first known to the reading public, together with what manuscript evidence survives of what she had originally intended. It also reproduces the slender amount of personal writing that Emily Brontë left behind and both early criticism and early poems about her. Emily Brontë's sister Charlotte was significant in the initial reception of Emily's work, and this edition allows the reader to see Charlotte Brontë's interventions into her sister's texts and to evaluate them. Centrally, though, this edition is about how Emily Brontë, a remarkably original voice in literature, was first read. Here, primarily, is the Emily Brontë in and of her own lifetime.

Victorian Britain offered to the globe an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism - currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation - from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. Victorian Literature and Finance is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. These essays move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, Victorian Literature and Finance sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the nineteenth century.

'I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything.'The Duke of Omnium is overwhelmed by the death of his vivacious wife, Lady Glencora. Once the British Prime Minister, he is now in sole charge of his three wilful children. Lord Gerald has been sent down from University; Lord Silverbridge has defected from the Liberal cause of his father's party to the Conservative, and is badly in debt; Lady Mary has fallen in love with Frank Tregear, a commoner with a will of iron but no money. The Duke, troubled and without easy relationships with any of his children, tries to impose his own will. But the result seems to move the novel towards calamity. Searching the great topics of compromise and principle, of obedience and dissent, of personal integrity and the conflicts between generations, The Duke's Children is a domestic story with far-reaching political issues at stake. It is a fitting end to the Palliser series, one of the most remarkable achievements of British fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'He's spoilt my life,- he's spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth'The compelling story of an ordinary girl's tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell's last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the ever-present threat of press-gangs, the story darkens when Sylvia's father is roused into vengeful violence. But this trouble proves only the precursor to a greater calamity that will radically alter Sylvia's future.Gaskell's novel, richly engaging with the legacy of the Brontë sisters, is her most extensive literary exploration of the tragic depths of unregarded, unhistoric, but vividly imagined lives. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is the first rigorous scholarly edition of a substantial selection of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) ever produced. Swinburne was one of the most brilliant and controversial poets of the nineteenth century: a republican; a scorner of established Christianity; a writer of sexual daring; a poet of loss and of love. Yet he is also the most misunderstood poet of the Victorian period. This new edition, with substantial editorial material, presents a new and convincing portrait of a man sharply different from what is usually said of him. Beginning with his unpublished 'Ode to Mazzini' (1857) and ending with his last major critical work on The Age of Shakespeare (1908), this edition offers Swinburne in the round--a man of astonishing consistency whose formal innovations and critical penetration remain persistently engaging as well as provocative. A major introduction explores Swinburne's complicated reaction to the scandal of his first major collection, Poems and Ballads (1866); his life-long commitment to radical voices (Blake, Hugo, Landor, Shelley); his permanent hostility to tyranny; his sense of literature as a living form and of the heroic personality of the artist; his dazzling art criticism and adroit analysis of Renaissance and modern literature; his exceptional elegies for dead friends; his burlesques and richly atmospheric fiction and drama. This is a new, more complete, more challenging, but also more credible Swinburne than has ever been presented. Scholarly annotation draws on rich contemporary sources, manuscripts, and the diverse print culture of Swinburne's day, as well as moving through ancient and modern languages that Swinburne wrote with fluency.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens'' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin''s place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.