Outputs (13)

Race and biology (2016)
Book Chapter

The period 1880-1920 saw the emergence and then the qualified effacing of powerful discourses of racial essentialism and biological determinism: it was a period profoundly influenced, even mesmerized, by the authority of Darwinian science. This chapt... Read More about Race and biology.

Naturalism and decadence: The case of Hubert Crackanthorpe (2013)
Book Chapter

This chapter examines the conjunctions between naturalist poetics and decadent sensibility in late nineteenth-century British fiction. It examines how the highly influential yet aesthetically problematic reach of naturalism became entangled in debate... Read More about Naturalism and decadence: The case of Hubert Crackanthorpe.

Hardy and friendship (2013)
Book Chapter

This chapter argues that, as with many writers, the experience of friend and friendship for the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is intimately bound up with the development of the faculty of the creative imagination and the pursuit of the w... Read More about Hardy and friendship.

Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940 (2012)
Book Chapter

This essay examines the interplay between strands of ecological thinking and radical politics in Britain between 1880 and 1940, focussing on the notion of guardianship - as opposed to mastery - of the earth. An efflorescence of political-ecological t... Read More about Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940.

Shakespeare and politics (2011)
Book Chapter

This essay examines the complex ways in which Shakespeare’s plays, and the figure of Shakespeare himself becomes entangled in political argument from the post-Napoleonic years until the early twentieth century, particularly as a source of inspiration... Read More about Shakespeare and politics.

"Out of the way places": Exploring remoteness in Hardy's fiction (2010)
Journal Article

Provincial Fiction and the Decline of 'Puritan England' (2010)
Book Chapter

This chapter situates three major exponents of provincial fiction, Thomas Hardy, ‘Mark Rutherford’ and Arnold Bennett, in relation to ideas about provincialism, and changes in the relationship between the metropolitan centre and provincial and region... Read More about Provincial Fiction and the Decline of 'Puritan England'.

Reading matter and the matter of reading in Gissing’s fiction (2010)
Book Chapter

This chapter revisits George Gissing’s handling of reading practices within the realist frame of his practice as a novelist to show the variety of reality effects linked to reading matter and the reading subject – the choice of books, their location... Read More about Reading matter and the matter of reading in Gissing’s fiction.

Thomas Hardy’s notebooks (2009)
Book Chapter

Socialism and radicalism (2007)
Book Chapter

This chapter examines the flowering of radical and socialist political cultures at the fin de siècle in which forms of collectivism, as against individualism, gain increasing prominence. The influence of Comtean Positivism, Philosophical Idealism and... Read More about Socialism and radicalism.