Best Selling Books by Patricia Ingham

"Late medieval English Arthurian romance has broad cultural ambitions, offering a fantasy of insular union as an "imagined cimmunity" of British sovereignty. the Arthurian lageneds provided a means to explore England''s historical indebtedness to and intimacies with Celtic culture, allowing nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to France and claim themselves heirs to an insular heritage".

The Language of Gender and Class challenges widely-held assumptions about the study of the Victorian novel. Lucid, multilayered and cogently argued, this volume will provoke debate and encourage students and scholars to rethink their views on ninteenth-century literature. Examining six novels, Patricia Ingham demonstrates that none of the writers, male or female, easily accept stereotypes of gender and class. The classic figures of Angel and Whore are reassessed and modified. And the result, argues Ingham, is that the treatment of gender by the late nineteenth century is released from its task of containing neutralising class conflict. New accounts of feminity can begin to emerge. The novels which Ingham studies are: * Shirley by Charlotter Bronte * North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell * Felix Holt by George Eliot * Hard Times by Charles Dickens * The Unclassed by George Gissing * Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

This is the first full-length study of the treatment of women in Dickens? novels to make use of modern critical approaches. It replaces traditional biographical methods with a new linguistic model which directs attention back to the texts. Patricia Ingham''s innovatory approach characterises Dickens? novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale''s Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens? individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both degraded and valuable, worthless and powerful; ?ideal? women are desirable and undesirable, passive and destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain. The book''s conclusion is that the ambiguous struggle between convention and dissent in the language he uses for representing women charges Dickens? novels with their uneasy excitement and power.

Part of the new OWC series, Authors in Context, Thomas Hardy is a critical companion to the OWC Hardy editions. It examines Hardy''s novels and puts them in their author''s social, cultural, and political contexts. Thomas Hardy was born before the invention of the car, the telephone, and the airplane, when no woman could vote, when there were different rules for men and women wanting to divorce, and education was the preserve of the upper classes. He lived to see the Zeppelins over London, new divorce laws, wider educational opportunities, votes for women, and the questioning of religion. In novels such as Tess of the d''Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure Hardy engaged directly with the issues of the day, and his fiction resonates with contemporary concerns. This book explores the interconnections between life and art, and shows how modern interpretations in film and television create new contexts in which to read the works afresh.

''The Brontës'' is a topical exploration of the novels of the three Brontë sisters in relation to the age in which they lived, and in modern contexts such as film and television. The book traces the origins of novels such as ''Jane Eyre'' and ''Wuthering Heights'' and examines the 20th century''s remaking of the novels in film and TV.

This book shows uniquely how the most powerful aspects of language in literary texts are those that the reader does not see. It makes these hidden features visible by a close read of six well-known Victorian novels including Bleak House and Tess of the D''Urbervilles. The readings of the novels provide tools to illustrate how texts encode assumptions and social meaning. This has until now only been done for short pieces of writing.

Part of new OWC series, Authors in Context, Thomas Hardy is a critical companion to the OWC Hardy editions. It examines Hardy''s novels in the context of their author''s social, cultural, and political context and shows how they engaged directly with the issues of the day. It shows how critical interpretations have changed over time, and how modern interpretations on film and television create new contexts in which to read the works afresh.