Cambridge English Prose Texts – serie

By the end of the nineteenth century the novel unquestionably had become the most popular and influential of English literary forms. Yet it has not always been clear how the Victorians themselves regarded the nature of prose fiction. This volume is a collection of twelve 'landmark' essays that chart the development of English theories of fiction during the great age of the novel. Spanning the whole of the Victorian period, from Bulwer Lytton's 'On Art in Fiction' (1838) to Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), the volume also includes pieces by George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a number of the more important critics and reviewers of the time. The editors' introduction surveys the main issues, such as the debate between realism and romance, addressed by novel criticism throughout the period. Each of the selections that follow is set in its historical context by a prefatory essay and is fully annotated for the student. There is a helpful bibliography of further reading.

Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to selections of non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. The series provides students, primarily though not exclusively those of English literature, with the opportunity of reading significant prose writers who, for a variety of reasons (not least their generally being unavailable in suitable editions), are rarely studied, but whose influence on their times was very considerable. Marilyn Butler's volume centres on the great Revolution debate in England in the 1790s, inspired by the French Revolution. The debate consists of a single series of works which depend for their meaning upon one another, and upon the historical situation which gave them birth. Major tracts by Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Paine (The Rights of Man), and Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) are given at length, while important shorter pieces by such writers as Hannah More, Thomas Spence, and William Cobbett appear virtually complete. The volume is especially interesting for its portrait of a community of oppositional writers. Many of them knew one another personally, and stimulated and sustained one another against the pro-government majority. Their collaborative literary enterprise, and its break up, offer a fascinating perspective on Romanticism and the growth of an extra-parliamentary opposition functioning through the press. The volume also reveals the impact of the great debate on writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. As with other titles in the series, the volume is comprehensively annotated: obscure allusions to people, places, and events are glossed in footnotes and endnotes, while prefactory headnotes comment on the circumstances surrounding the composition of each extract. In a substantial introduction Dr Butler offers a broad examination of this pamphlet war and its main participants. There is a helpful critical guide to further reading for those wishing to pursue their study of the subject. The volume will be a vital sourcebook for students of English Romantic literature, history, and political history.

Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to substantial selections from non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The series provides students, primarily though not exclusively those of English literature, with the opportunity of reading significant prose writers who, for a variety of reasons (not least their generally being unavailable in suitable editions) are rarely studied, but whose influence on their times was very considerable. This volume contains selections from nineteenth-century writers involved in the debate about the relation of science and religion. It centres on the Darwinian controversy, with extracts from The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man, and from opponents and supporters of Darwin. This controversy is placed in the wider context of the earlier debates on geology and evolution; the relation of science to Natural Theology; the effect of Biblical Criticism on the interpretation of Genesis; and the professionalisation of science by aggressively agnostic scientists.

This book is devoted to the writings of the Evangelical and Oxford movements, whose leading members were key figures in the religious debate that so preoccupied early Victorian society. The Evangelical writers included here - Charles Simeon, Francis Close, William Goode and Edward Miall - enjoyed wide influence in their own day but their writings are now either forgotten or largely inaccessible. The writers in the Oxford Movement represented here - Keble, Williams, Newman and Pusey - are better known, though only Newman's prose has received much attention. By concentrating upon the period 1825 to 1850 Dr Jay is able to show the complex social, educational, and political influences on the religious debate and to trace the dynamics of the relationship between the two movements. This book will prove to be an indispensable tool for all serious students of nineteenth-century literature, history and theology.

Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to selections from non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This volume is concerned with radical prose from the period 1642-60 and comprises political pamphlets covering the years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth. All the pamphlets are revolutionary in varying degrees: two by Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and The Readie and the Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth; one each by the three Leveller leaders, Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton; one by the Digger, Winstanley and one by the Republican, Harrington. There is a substantial introduction to the whole volume in which the editors offer a historical survey of the period, consider the intellectual and political context of the pamphlets, sketch in significant biographical details and examine the various styles which the writers employ. This book will prove to be an indispensable tool for all serious students of seventeenth-century literature, history and political theory.

Mary Ann Radzinowicz's volume comprises texts from the American colonial period, which bear witness to the extraordinary diversity of writing at this time. All the texts are permeated by a strong historical consciousness. Indeed five of the ten writers selected called their writing 'histories'. What we see emerging from the writers is a particular American identity, full of idealism and a strong emotional commitment to ideas, culminating in the Declaration of Independence and the metamorphosis of America from colony to nation. Professor Radzinowicz has written a substantial introduction to the volume in which she provides a history of the thirteen colonies, exploring the social, theological, intellectual and political expectations of the early settlers. This volume will be indispensable reading for students of American literature and history.

Seventeenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented flourishing of natural philosophy, inspired by Francis Bacon's call for a new science based on observation and experiment, to be carried out in collective research projects,whose findings would be communicated in clear language. This anthology documents the effect of Bacon's ideas in the remarkably fruitful period following 1660. It includes his sketch of a scientific research institute in the New Atlantis (1627), which inspired the founding of the Royal Society in 1662, as acknowledged by Thomas Sprat in its History, excerpted here. Bacon's plea for an appropriate language for science also affected the Royal Society, as Sprat records, and gave birth to a number of schemes for man-made artificial languages, represented here by John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). The selections are accompanied by a general introduction, extensive notes, contemporary illustrations, a glossary of obsolete and technical terms and an updated bibliography.

By the start of the Victorian period the school of British economists acknowledging Adam Smith as its master was in the ascendancy. 'Political Economy', a catch-all title which ignored the diversity of viewpoints to be found amongst the discipline's leading proponents, became associated in the popular mind with moral and political forces held to be uniquely conducive to the progress of an increasingly industrialised and competitive society. 'Political Economy' served in turn as the focus for critics of equally diverse moral and political persuasions, who sought to challenge the materialism of contemporary society and offer their own assessments of the profound social changes of the time. In the introductory essay to the collection of readings from such 'critics of capitalism', the editors review the principles of the early economists, the way in which these principles were appropriated and applied by their Victorian successors and the contrasting modes which critics of popular economic ideas assumed. Subsequent extracts from the writings of the Owenite Socialist John Bray, Carlyle, Marx and Engels, J. S. Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, T. H. Green, William Morris and G. B. Shaw, demonstrate both the breadth of the possible grounds for ideological opposition to the prevailing philosophy and the shifting nature of the debate as 'Political Economy' itself was revealed as incapable of explaining or responding to the changing conditions of the 1870s. Headnotes to the extracts describe the genesis of individual debate and discuss distinctive stylistic features. Annotation in the form of footnotes and endnotes has been designed to gloss obscure allusions and arguments. In making more accessible the socio-economic writings of those authors now better known for their imaginative work, this volume will enable readers to reach a more profound appreciation of the central role such work played in developing the moral vision embodied in their more lastingly popular books and essays.

This edition brings together for the first time key texts representing the writings of the medieval English mystics. The texts have been newly edited from early manuscripts, and are supplemented with textual and explanatory notes and a glossary. The book focuses on five major authors, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Dame Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. Shorter works are presented whole, where possible, and accompanied by extracts from the mystics' longer works; extracts from contemporary translations into English are also included to illustrate the reception of European mystical texts in later medieval England. Overall, this volume makes accessible some of the finest writing by English contemplatives and visionaries of the Middle Ages.

English critics were brilliant initiators and exploiters of biblical criticism. This momentous exercise, whereby the 'Holy Scriptures' became the object of human critique independent of church control, is illustrated by John Drury in the present volume with excerpts from such famous critics as Coleridge, Blake and Matthew Arnold, and lesser names such as Collins and Deist and Bishop Sherlock. Robert Lowth's famous lectures on the Psalms, which had an important influence on Blake and Christopher Smart, are well represented here, as is the famous contribution to Essays and Reviews by Benjamin Jowett. This book provides the only available collection of biblical criticism from this important period of critical enquiry, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extracts are accompanied by a full editorial introduction, notes and a bibliography. They should be read by all students of literature and theology interested in the period.