ESSAYS ON 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE & THE GOTHIC
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… There’s an elegant simplicity to the structure of The Time Machine, developed perfectly in a mere 35,000 words; like several of Wells’ iconic ‘scientific romances’, it is more novella than novel. In a tight framing narrative, an old friend of an unnamed, 40-year-old inventor referred to only as… Continue reading The Time Machine
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Although Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) sent shockwaves through the Victorian scientific and religious establishments (until then unproblematically linked), the book’s conclusion is remarkably optimistic: …from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production… Continue reading The Island of Dr Moreau
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… When Voltaire’s Candide, ou l'Optimisme was (pseudonymously) published in February 1759, it was simultaneously released in the three great publishing centers of Continental Europe: Geneva, Amsterdam, and Paris. This was in part to shift as many copies as possible before it was pirated, but mostly to make it difficult for the… Continue reading Candide
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Sometime between 1845 and 1846, the literary journalist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) drafted a few short pieces entitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society (illustrated by himself), which he hoped would constitute the opening chapters of an as yet unspecified longer work. ‘The truth forces itself upon me,’ he… Continue reading Vanity Fair
Extract of a piece originally written for the Wordsworth Editions Blog... ...Although a recognised essayist and travel writer, Treasure Island was Stevenson’s first novel, discounting some unfinished juvenilia which he had burned. This was in the hope of making his craft pay, because, as he later wrote in ‘My First Book’: By that time I… Continue reading Treasure Island
Extract of an interview on the ‘Essence of the Gothic’ with novelist Audrey Chin What is Gothic literature? Is there a difference between the modern and Victorian variety? Or the Asian and European ones? And why is it considered part of the literature of subversion? I’m a neophyte to the genre. Indeed, I would not have… Continue reading The Essence of the Gothic: In Conversation with Audrey Chin
Extract of a piece originally published by Wordsworth Editions… ...Although a much more complex novel than Tom Sawyer, the story of Huckleberry Finn is deceptively simple. Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi Valley through Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, ending up in Arkansas where Tom Sawyer re-joins the narrative having been left behind in St. Petersburg… Continue reading Huckleberry Finn
Extract from a post originally published by Wordsworth Editions… ...Children’s literature was already an established genre on both sides of the Atlantic, the so-called ‘First Golden Age of Children’s Fiction’ heralded by the English translation of Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812). Wyss had written the book for his sons to deliver Christian moral lessons… Continue reading Tom Sawyer
Extract of a piece for Wordsworth Editions Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, the oldest of six children, to a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. Then the capital of Bohemia, Prague was a melting pot of different nationalities, languages, and political and social structures, all of which existed uneasily side-by-side, trying to find… Continue reading Looking for Kafka
Extract from an article originally published by Wordsworth Editions… The Whale (renamed Moby-Dick at the last minute) was birthed after an 18-month labour including a substantial rewrite that saw Melville sailing so close to the wind that he was still editing proofs when the novel went to print in the autumn of 1851. Although the original plan… Continue reading Moby Dick
Ainsworth & Friends 