Josie Billington

Angus Easson

Joanne Shattock

Marion Shaw

Joanne Wilkes

Deirdre d'Albertis

Linda K Hughes

Elisabeth Jay

Charlotte Mitchell

Linda H Peterson

Alan Shelston

A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.

The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Part I Vol 5

Philip Davis

Rhiannon Corcoran

Arthur Frank

‘Psychology in Action’ is a term coined by the Guest Editors from the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), University of Liverpool, in their work in filming, recording and analyzing shared reading groups, led by The Reader organization. It refers both to the work of psychology within literary texts and to the responses of multifarious reader-participants to literature read live and aloud in small community groups within a variety of settings. In particular, ‘psychology in action’ has meant seeing readers suddenly activated into deep personal thinking, responding to situations imaginatively simulated by reading literature in ways that trigger surprised and involuntary emotion, autobiographical memory and spontaneous empathy.

Reading, Literature, and Psychology in Action

The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Part II vol 4

Deputy Director Centre for Research Into Reading Literature and Society Josie Billington

"Josie Billington seeks to resituate Gaskell's work within the wider tradition of nineteenth-century realism and argues that Gaskell deserves to be read not as a poor second to George Eliot but as offering an English Victorian equivalent of the religious realism of Leo Tolstoy.

Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy : a Comparative Study

Faithful Realism

Middlemarch is one of the great classic novels of the Victorian Age and has also been seen as a key turning point in the history of the genre. George Eliot's novel is widely studied and this guide will provide an introduction to its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text. It is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, setting Middlemarch in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. It also discusses the cultural afterlife including film and TV adaptations. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading.

Eliot's Middlemarch

The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Part I

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work. This volume includes her 1883 novel The Ladies Lindores with editorial notes by Josie Billington including a new introduction and headnote, giving key information about the book and its publication history.

The Ladies Lindores

The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Part VI Volume 24

This book brings together into one edited volume the most compelling rationales for literary reading and health, the best current practices in this area and state of the art research methodologies. It consolidates the findings and insights of this burgeoning field of enquiry across diverse disciplines and groups: psychologists, neurologists, and social scientists; literary scholars, writers and philosophers; medical researchers and practitioners; reading charities and arts organisations. Following introductory chapters on the literary-historical background to reading and health, the book is divided into four key sections. The first part focuses on Practices, showcasing reading interventions and cultures in clinical and community mental health care and in secure settings. This is followed by Research Methodologies, featuring innovative qualitative and quantitative approaches, and by a section covering Theory, with chapters from eminent thinkers in psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis. The final part is concerned with Implementation, incorporating perspectives from health professionals, commissioners and reading practitioners. This innovate work explains why reading matters in health and wellbeing, and offers a foundational text to future scholars in the field and to health professionals and policy-makers in relation to the embedding of reading practices in professional health care.

Reading and Mental Health

An examination of the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that connects her creative disposition, mind and mode to Shakespeare.

'This is Living Art'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Barrett Browning's work within the rich context of her life and writing career. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the reception of Barrett Browning as a writer within an explicitly female tradition has tended to limit the appreciation of her wider contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as a ringleted romantic heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction—from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. The selection of works presented here appear in the order in which they were originally published, enabling students and readers to experience the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Barrett Browning, and a Chronology.

Selected Writings

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. Medical Humanities comprises disciplines as diverse as literature, the visual and performing arts, the history of medicine, bioethics. It claims a vast range of philosophical and political agendas, goals and purposes, including the education of medical students in areas of clinical empathy, critical thinking, ethical awareness, gender and race issues and cross-cultural medicine. Josie Billington argues that in so far as literature is offered as adding value to medical education in health training and practice, that defence tends to become instrumental in nature, whether consciously and explicitly, or otherwise. This book is interested, more widely, in the power of the arts as a remedial force. Following an introduction surveying the idea of the Medical Humanities, its history, and its development, the book's four chapters will look at illness and health as defined in medical terms and as complicated within the field of imaginative literature; at narrative and storytelling within the therapeutic meeting of medical and literary approaches; at reading groups and private reading, considering contemporary models of literary reading as a template for redefining literature's place and power not only within the discipline of Medical Humanities but within the wider world in relation to concerns of mental wellbeing that affect us all.

The Literary Agenda

Is Literature Healthy?

Ideal guide to reading and studying this complex and challenging novel. >

“There never was a wilder story imagined,” wrote one reviewer on the first publication of Frankenstein in 1818: “we do not well see why it should have been written.” The admiring Sir Walter Scott felt that Frankenstein’s “unexpected and fearful events… shook a little even our firm nerves”. The prophetic power of novel’s imagery in reflecting the dehumanising effects of science, technology, empire, business and the mass media has never abated. Writing in 2002, Jay Clayton said: “As a cautionary tale, Frankenstein has had an illustrious career; virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries – revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War 1, Nazism, nuclear holocaust, clone, replicants and robots – has been symbolized by Shelley’s monster. Perhaps more than any other novel, Frankenstein has been interpreted as a warning impeding events.” For some readers these warnings have produced a monstrous creation in place of Mary Shelley’s own. “Frankenstein is a product of criticism, not a work of literature,” argues Fred Botting. Yet if the metaphorical interpretations of the novel appear to exceed the adolescent fantasy which gave rise to them, this is in itself a tribute to the original work, concludes Levine: “The book is larger and richer than any of its progeny and too complex to serve as mere background… The novel has qualities that allow it to exfoliate as creatively and endlessly as any important myth.” In this book, Josie Billington looks at the story and its legacy, and sifts the vast repertoire of critical opinion to give us the most interesting verdicts on the novel.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

When Middlemarch was first published in 1872, it was recognised as an unprecedented achievement and as marking a new era in the development of the novel. Edith Simcox, later a close friend and personal champion of George Eliot, wrote that Middlemarch “marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life”. One of her shrewdest early reviewers, R.H. Hutton, compared her work to that of her popular contemporary, Anthony Trollope, saying: “He scours a greater surface of modern life but rarely or never the emotions which lie concealed behind. His characters are carved out of the materials of ordinary society; George Eliot’s include many which make ordinary society seem a sort of satire on the life behind.” Today, for fans and detractors alike, says Josie Billington in her succinct but comprehensive and highly entertaining guide, Middlemarch is synonymous with what we mean by the terms “novel”, “realism” and “Victorian”, and its power to move modern audiences was demonstrated by the powerful appeal of the BBC dramatisation in 1994. So what makes this novel great even for those who feel cheated or saddened by it? For the novel’s passionate admirers, Henry James among them, “that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life… which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce” offers its own rich consolations. Perhaps that sentiment is best summed up by the 20th-century novelist Stanley Middleton, who said, if we have no God, we do at least have Middlemarch.

Josie Billington

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