Rod Edmond – författare

First published in 1988, Affairs of the Hearth challenges many widely held assumptions about Victorian culture and shows that its poetry was far more innovative and experimental than it is often considered to be. The author argues that, far from being complacent about domesticity or reticent about sexuality, Victorian writers discussed these matters perceptively and in detail. He shows that the poems analyzed by Clough, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Meredith are preoccupied with the stresses of marriage, sexuality, gender, the role of women, parent-child relationships, and adolescence. The same themes are explored as the author makes comparisons with contemporary painting, fiction, and diaries. He discovers a collection of unhappy homes and appalling families and finds the tensions of Victorian life in the very images of domestic comfort.

In analysing the texts both closely and historically, Edmond draws accessibly on the theoretical work by Foucault, Williams, and Eagleton, and tests it against specific texts and a particular culture. He also contributes to the historical debate of the time about the history of the family and will be of interest to all students of Victorian literature, social history, women’s studies, and literary theory.

First published in 1988, Affairs of the Hearth challenges many widely held assumptions about Victorian culture and shows that its poetry was far more innovative and experimental than it is often considered to be. The author argues that, far from being complacent about domesticity or reticent about sexuality, Victorian writers discussed these matters perceptively and in detail. He shows that the poems analyzed by Clough, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Meredith are preoccupied with the stresses of marriage, sexuality, gender, the role of women, parent-child relationships, and adolescence. The same themes are explored as the author makes comparisons with contemporary painting, fiction, and diaries. He discovers a collection of unhappy homes and appalling families and finds the tensions of Victorian life in the very images of domestic comfort.

In analysing the texts both closely and historically, Edmond draws accessibly on the theoretical work by Foucault, Williams, and Eagleton, and tests it against specific texts and a particular culture. He also contributes to the historical debate of the time about the history of the family and will be of interest to all students of Victorian literature, social history, women’s studies, and literary theory.

Cricket, Fiction and Nation traces the historic arc of fiction dealing with cricket from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its emergence in the early twentieth century as a form of serious literature, its subsequent decline into genre writing and its rejuvenation in the global world of the twenty-first century. The writers discussed include Mary Russell Mitford, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. Day Lewis writing as Nicholas Blake, L.P. Hartley, Simon Raven, J.L. Carr, Mike Marqusee, Nancy Spain, Caryl Phillips, Romesh Gunesekera, Anthony Quinn and Shehan Karunatilaka. It also considers how cricket has featured in the TV series Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders.