This book presents a study of the ways in which concepts of pain were treated across a broad range of late Victorian writing, placing literary texts alongside sermons, medical textbooks and the campaigning leaflets.

Examining these twin concerns, Robert Crawford sheds new light on the poet's achievement--particularly those works that culminated in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes--and clarifies Eliot's relentless obsession with "savages" and ...

Examining these twin concerns, Robert Crawford sheds new light on the poet's achievement--particularly those works that culminated in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes--and clarifies Eliot's relentless obsession with "savages" and ...

These texts chart their authors' disenchantment with the limitations of romance and of their own careers, yet they also form an alternative canon of vernacular writing, which is both self-referential and self-questioning.

A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the ...

Finally, the book argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement towards divinely sanctioned closure; mischief, irony, polysemy remain; romance's political problems are competitive, multiple, and tumescently unpredictable.

But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form and meaning.