Lists historical, bibliographical, and biographical research materials and libraries that suit the needs of today's graduate student and literary scholars

Selective Bibliography for the Study of English and American Literature

Literature & Fiction

ALTICK, RICHARD D.

Wright, Andrew H.

Classics

Pearson College Div

This textbook introduces the principles of critical reading and writing and covers connotation, diction, tone, form, and logic

Preface to Critical Reading

Lunsford, Andrea A.

Holt; Rinehart; Winston

This 199 page book looks at how Lancaster County, Pennsylvania became a tourist mecca. "For in those rich farmlands dwelled the Amish and Mennonite, the 'Pennsylvania Dutch' who had fled the turmoil of the old world for worship and toil in the new. Details of their lives had changed little over the years." "The tourist buses came, bringing plastic power and cash, and when the author came home as an adult, all was changed." This book tells the story of how Lancaster County dramatically changed in the 1900s.

Of a Place and a Time: Remembering Lancaster

Biographies & Memoirs

Archon Books

The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public : 1800-1900

History & Criticism

Univ of Chicago Pr

Life in the Victorian period, focusing on the social, religious, scientific, and artistic movements that characterized the age. The reputation of the Victorian age in England has undergone many vicissitudes, but it is now higher than ever. In this important study, Richard D. Altick moves us toward an understanding of the social, intellectual, and theological crises that Carlyle and Dickens, Tennyson and Arnold were daily struggling to solve. And the issues were many: the revolution in class structure and class attitudes; the rise of utilitarianism and the evangelical spirit; the crisis in religion, including the Oxford movement and Darwinism; the democratization of culture; the place of art and the artist in an industrial, bourgeois society; the effects of industrialism, especially on the way people live. Altick brings to the discussion of these complicated questions the lively and sensitive intelligence that his many readers have come to expect. He includes contemporary illustrations and a full reference index.

Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

"Of course I do not wish for murders," a character in a nineteenth-century novel remarks, "but when there is one, why, I like it. It is human nature." Human nature it is indeed, and murder has always fascinated mankind. Never, however, was the absorption more tireless, never was the shudder of terror closer to enjoyment than in the Victorian era.In the first chapters, Mr. Altick examines the Victorian delight in murder as a social phenomenon. The remainder of the book is constructed around classic murder cases that afford a vivid perspective on the way people lived--and died--in the Age of Victoria.From the beginning of the age, homicide was a national entertainment. Penny broadsheets hawked in the streets highlighted the most gruesome features of crimes; newspapers recounted the most minute details, from the discovery of the body to the execution of the criminal. Real-life murders were quickly adapted for the gaslight melodrama and the bestselling novels of the "Newgate" and "sensation" schools. Murder scenes and celebrities were the most popular exhibits at Madame Tussaud's waxworks and in the touring peepshows and marionette entertainments.Murder, in fact, was a crimson thread running through the whole fabric of Victorian life. By tracing this thread in "not too solemn a spirit," Mr. Altick has written a book that will delight and inform all who are interested in social history, as well as that great number who relish true murder stories.

Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria

History

Europe

Since The Art of Literary Research was first published in 1963, it has been the established guide to the purposes, methods, and pleasures of research in English and American literature. It is the essential companion for courses in bibliography and research techniques and for programs in independent study, advanced composition, and undergraduate honors.
For interested readers who have other vocational plans, its authors-experienced researchers themselves-provide an intimate view of the way professional scholars go about their specialized and challenging tasks.
This extensively revised Fourth Edition takes full account of recent developments that have virtually revolutionized certain important areas of the discipline. The computer, as newly written pages demonstrate, not only has eliminated much of the drudgery formerly associated with the gathering, storage, and retrieval of raw data but has made possible many analytical and lexical operations that had been beyond human capacity, yet without diminishing the amount of sheer brain work still required to produce a genuine contribution to knowledge. The book also suggests that "traditional" literary studies, freshly evaluated, are compatible with the current emphasis on critical theory, not inimical to it.
The ongoing revision of the literary canon under the impact of women's studies, African-American studies, and other movements, as well as the intensified scholarly and critical interest in present-day writers, is reflected in the book's hundreds of illustrative examples, extensive lists of several related books and articles, and hands-on exercises. The exercises range from the simple, short answer type that offer practice in the use of secondary materials such as can be found in any college library, to projects that may occupy a number of weeks of research in primary sources and are geared to the extensive holdings of large university libraries.
The basic rationale and structure of the book, having proved themselves in previous editions, remain unchanged. The first half outlines the principles underlying the critical examination of evidence and describes in detail the chief branches of literary inquiry. Further chapters offer practical advice on bibliographical procedure and note-taking, particularly as these are made more efficient by electronic aids, and on the writing of scholarly papers (in one of the best discussions of the craft of expository prose t be found in any textbook); guide the student through the great American and British libraries whose stocks of books and manuscripts are indispensable to original literary research; and reviews the rewards, obligations, and ethics of the profession.

The Art of Literary Research

Fenstermaker, John J.

Reference

A Literary History of England Vol. 4

First published in 1959. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Chew, Samuel C.

Routledge

Victorian People and Ideas

Dent

A berserk elephant gunned down in the heart of London, a machine for composing Latin hexameters, and the original rock band (1841)―these are but three of the sights that London curiosity–seekers from every walk of life paid to see from the Elizabethan era to the mid–Victorian period. Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.
Drawing on a wealth of never-before-used information, Mr. Altick traces London exhibitions as they evolved from the display of relics in pre-Reformation churches, through the collections of eighteenth-century virtuosi, to the first science museums and public art galleries. He also narrates for the first time the history of the panorama and diorama as an influential genre of nineteenth-century popular art. At every point, the London shows are linked to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and to trends in public taste.
The material is fresh and fascinating; the range--from freaks to popular science, from the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey to Madame Tussaud's waxworks--impressive. Like the exhibitions that best served the Victorian ideal of mass culture, The Shows of London is both entertaining and informative.

The Shows of London (Belknap Press)

Dramas & Plays

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

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