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This is a landmark intellectual history of Britain's working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers' memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose uncovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew. A new preface addresses the continuing relevance of the book amidst the upheavals of the present day. "An astonishing book."--Ian Sansom, The Guardian "A passionate work of history. . . . Rose has written a work of staggering ambition."--Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal Winner of the SHARP Book History Prize, the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize, and the British Council Prize cowinner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize for 2001; named one of the finest books of 2001 by The Economist.

Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no understatement to say that this is one of the most influential books of the last twenty years. Widely read both by social scientists and humanists, it has become an unavoidable document. For people in the humanities, Anderson is particularly interesting because he explores the rise of nationalism in connection with the rise of the novel.

"This book is an inquiry into blank or empty spaces in primarily English printed books in the period c. 1500 - c. 1700, as well as in Renaissance culture more generally. The book concentrates on the "substrate" -- the background of any printed work - which is often held to be empty or blank space. These spaces are also considered as "gaps" (where text or images are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, or perhaps never devised in the first place). The topics discussed include: space and silence; emptiness and absence; the vacuum; "race" and racial identity; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as "waste" or "vacant;" blank forms and bureaucracy; political and devotional spaces; censorship; endings; fragments; terminations; and mortality. The book pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton. But the book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Arbella Stuart, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth, as well as introducing readers to many lesser-known figures and writings of the period"

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the 'best-loved' poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the 90 or so published poems that are at the core of her remarkable canon of verse. Drawing on biographical and critical material, Jonathan Post also makes frequent use of Bishop's letters and commentary by fellow poets, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and James Merrill to illuminate her writing and contemporary literary landscape. Throughout, Post places Bishop's lyric poetry within the context of her life and aesthetic values, showing how these shaped her work. The book covers a wide range of core themes present in her poetry, including her powerful use of description, the environment, balance, and ideas of love and loss, as well as looking at Bishop's interest in the visual arts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them. Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.

This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.

Shedding new light on both classic and lesser-known works in the Melville canon with particular attention to the author's literary use of the Bible, Neither Believer Nor Infidel examines the debate between religious skepticism and Christian faith that infused Herman Melville's writings following Moby-Dick. Jonathan A. Cook's study is the first to focus on the decisive role of faith and doubt in Melville's writings following his mid-career turn to shorter fiction, and still later to poetry, as a result of the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that Melville "can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief," a remark that encapsulates an essential truth about Melville's attitude to Christianity. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Melville spent his literary career poised between an intellectual rejection of Christian dogma and an emotional attachment to the consolations of non-dogmatic Christian faith. Accompanying this ambivalence was a lifelong devotion to the text of the King James Bible as both moral sourcebook and literary template. Following a biographical overview of skeptical influences and manifestations in Melville's early life and career, Cook examines the evidence of religious doubt and belief in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!," "The Encantadas," Israel Potter, Battle-Pieces, Timoleon, and Billy Budd. Accessible for both the general reader and the scholar, Neither Believer Nor Infidel clarifies the ambiguities of Melville's pervasive use of religion in his fiction and poetry. In analyzing Melville's persistent oscillation between metaphysical rebellion and attenuated belief, Cook elucidates both well-known and under-appreciated works.

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals. Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs. This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed. Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.