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While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

This book offers a fresh look at one of the most tenacious features of Romantic Hellenism: its fascination with modern Greece as material and ideal alike. It suggests that literary representations of modern Greece, by both foreign and Greek writers, run on notions of a significant landscape. Landscape, as a critical term, is itself the product of the period when Greece assumed increasing importance as a territorial, political and modern entity. The implied authority of nature, in turn, follows its own dynamic and highly ambivalent logic of representation. Greece operated as a material symbol, one that shared the brittle structure of the Romantic image. To explicate this enabling structure this study draws on the critical writings of Herder, Schiller and the early Romantics, while grounding mainly German philhellenic writing in its cultural and political context. Main authors discussed are Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, but also the first generation of Greek writers in the new nation state after 1821: Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, Panagiotis Soutsos, Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos. To enlist authors challenged to write from within the place of Greece allows not only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but also gives a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national movement.

This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were “out of place,” both in the world of nineteenth‐century evangelicalism and in American culture generally. It was in the hope of situating themselves in that culture, of assuring their readers and themselves of their place in nineteenth‐century America, that they wrote their books. Ultimately, however, these women would write somewhat anxious narratives, itinerant autobiographies still in search of their endings and meanings, books which attempt to summon up the interpretive communities capable of understanding strangers and pilgrims. These are, then, stories about the poetics of itinerancy and also about gender and genre, about the particular predicament of women negotiating with their culture for identity.

The book challenges the current view that personalism is primarily an early 20th-century phenomenon. The established definitions of personalism, mainly in terms of the American school of B. P. Bowne, are shown to fit broadly the positions of much earlier continental European and Scandinavian philosophers and theologians. The beginnings of specifically personalistic thought are traced to F. H. Jacobi’s criticism of pantheism, first set forth in the 1780s, and the work of the later F. W. J. Schelling. Its development is then identified in the work of selected, representative thinkers who, throughout the 19th century, build on or develop further positions established by Jacobi and Schelling, primarily the thinkers belonging to the broad current of so-called ‘speculative theism’ in Germany and in Sweden. The development of idealistic personalism in Britain by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, J. R. Illingworth, C. C. J. Webb and others is shown to be parallel to the emergence of the American school. It is argued that these should be seen as a continuation of the earlier European movement. Both the American and the British schools drew on the work of H. Lotze, but the book points to the neglected continental European background to Lotze, the current of personalistic, partly idealistic, and theistic philosophy of which Lotze’s work was only one, late variation. Discerning the central themes of the emerging worldview of personalism, the book establishes that they developed consistently in a broad, unitary movement with a distinct historical profile from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, the nature and importance of which has heretofore been neglected in the history of philosophy and in historical theology.

How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine — as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, this book challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.

In the years after 1815, a few visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch true mass media in America. They believed it was possible through new technology, national organization, and the grace of God to place the same printed message into the hands of every man, woman, and child in America. Though these entrepreneurs were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses. They were nonprofit religious organizations, including the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Sunday School Union. Faith in Reading tells the story of the noncommercial origins of mass media in America. The theme is how religious publishers learned to work against the flow of ordinary commerce. Religious publishing societies believed that reading was too important to be left to the “market revolution”; they sought to foil the market through the “visible hand” of organization. Though religious publishers worked against the market, they employed modern printing technologies and business methods, and were remarkably successful, churning out millions of Bibles, tracts, religious books, and periodicals. At the same time, they tried to teach people to read those books in the most traditional way. Their aim was to use new mass media to encourage old reading habits. This book examines both publishers and readers. It is about how religious publishing societies imagined their readers. It is also about reader response — how ordinary readers received and read religious books and tracts in early 19th century America.

This book offers a reassessment of the theology of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), one of the most significant theologians of the modern Church of England. It seeks to place Maurice’s theology in the context of nineteenth-century conflicts over the social role of the Church, and over the truth of the Christian revelation. Maurice is known today mostly for his seminal role in the formation of Christian Socialism, and for his dismissal from his chair at King’s College, London, over his denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Drawing on the whole range of Maurice’s extensive published work, this book argues that his theology as well as his social and educational activity were held together above all by his commitment to a renewal of Anglican ecclesiology. At a time when, following the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, many of his contemporaries feared that the authority of the Christian Church — and particularly of the Church of England — was under threat, Maurice sought to reinvigorate his Church’s sense of mission by emphasizing its national responsibility and its theological inclusiveness. In the process, he pioneered a new appreciation of the diversity of Christian traditions that was to be of great importance for the Church of England’s ecumenical commitment. He also sought to limit the damage of internal Church division by promoting a view of the Church’s comprehensiveness that acknowledged the complementary truth of convictions fiercely held by competing parties.