Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel

Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel
Author: Barbara Arnett Melchiori
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317208633

First published in 1985, this book looks at the ways in which the spate of terrorist activity in the 1880s was reflected in the novels of the time. Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw among others gave the terrorist venture a position in one or more of their novels. This book examines what these novelists made of terrorism and the way they presented it to their readers. Not all of these novels are high literature or take a committed line on the outrages they describe; nevertheless they accept the assumption that terrorism and social protest were synonymous. This book aims to explain how such a view could be held in the context of Victorian society.

The Princess Casamassima

The Princess Casamassima
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 966
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108857051

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in three volumes in 1886, The Princess Casamassima follows Hyacinth Robinson, a young London craftsman who carries the stigma of his illegitimate birth, and his French mother's murder of his patrician English father. Deeply impressed by the poverty around him, he is driven to association with political dissidents and anarchists including the charismatic Princess Casamassima - who embodies the problems of personal and political loyalty by which Hyacinth is progressively torn apart. This edition is the first to provide a full account of the context in which the book was composed and received. Extensive explanatory notes enable modern readers to understand its nuanced historical, cultural and literary references, and its complex textual history.