Library digitization has made more than 100,000 nineteenth-century English-language books available to the public. Do the books that have been digitized reflect the population of published books? An affirmative answer would allow book and literary historians to use holdings of major digital libraries as proxies for the population of published…

Oscar Wilde never danced as a hobby, but he was keen on featuring dancers in his literary works. His fairy-tale collections provide detailed depictions of dancing, ranging from classic ballroom dance to strange, uncanny kinds. The motif of dancing in Wilde's stories conveys the idea of estrangement in a double sense: referring to the divisions in…

This article explores child-authored texts, both real and fictional, and the adult discourse surrounding or commenting on such texts. It focuses on the example of young Marcel's writing in Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," and on the critical commentary on the juvenilia of child authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I…

This essay is a reflection on my teaching of "Jane Eyre" to a small intervention class in a large London secondary school. It is a reflection on the nature of reading as set out historically in educational policy and within hierarchies of power in school, in juxtaposition with the lived experiences of reading in the classroom. It is an…

The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the…

Victorian fiction can provide a valuable source of information about society by virtue of its topicality and realistic techniques, influenced by contemporary journalism. In particular, the novels of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy throw light on literacy practices, including reading aloud. The higher the literacy levels of the novels' characters,…

The article deals with a complicated archetypal tree complex in Russian literature. The object chosen here is "white willow" (vetla) as one of the species of willow in its different variations--daphne willow (verba) and goat willow (rakita), and willow itself. In the 19th century Russian literature we can find the image of white willow…

Struck by his GCSE students' bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at…

This article charts the similarities between the first short story appearance in 1839 of what later became Cirilo Villaverde's well-known nineteenth-century novel, "Cecilia Valdés" (1882), and Anselmo Suárez y Romero's "Carlota Valdés" (1838). The study considers the circle of influence in Cuba for writers during this time…

This paper explores representation of "Woman Question" in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and George Bernard Shaw's "Candida." The paper argues that unlike many studies that have read Candida and Nora as two disparate characters, they can be considered as the same "New Woman" represented only from different…

Many Critics believe that Henry James has set the definitive standards of modern fiction writing. Undoubtedly his groundbreaking article "The Art of Fiction," which published for the first time in 1884, has a major contribution in developing the theories of fiction writing. The term Organic Unity has derived from a major Formalist…

In "Wuthering Heights," Brontë provides us with the opportunity to meet two writing subjects; Emily Brontë herself and her character Catherine Earnshaw. Both these writers resist and challenge the authority of the patriarchal. Their different methods of interaction, though, cause one to fail and the other one to succeed. The objective of…

Graded readers, simplified versions of literature and other texts at graduated levels of difficulty, are widely employed in contexts of foreign language pedagogy and are widely considered to be a form of written-language input ostensibly suitable for a wide array of developmental stages. However, the efficacy of graded readers is not unchallenged,…

Fyodor Dostoevsky ranks among the most accomplished and respected figures in the history of literature. Almost a century and a half after his death, the major works for which he has become known--"The Brothers Karamazov," "Crime and Punishment," Demons", and "The Idiot" (Dostoevsky 1991, 1993, 1994, 2001,…

Drawing books can be seen as a vital component to teaching and learning art. They serve as an excellent resource for understanding the historical context of teaching drawing. As the industrial revolution geared forward in the nineteenth century, drawing books became a crucial source for sharing and disseminating educational philosophies for the…