Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture Inventions and Interventions

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt."

List of Illustrations, Foreword: The Critic as Investigator, List of Previously Published Essays, Introduction, Part 1. Women and Men, 1. “If I Can Make It There”: Oz’s Emerald City and the New Woman, 2. Christabel’s “Wandering Mother” and the Discourse of the Self: A Lacanian Reading of Repressed Narration, 3. The Ape and the Aristocrat, 4. Elizabeth Bishop and the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads: Sentimentalism, Straw Men, and Misprision, Part 2. Thomas De Quincey’s Violent Stages, 5. Bang-Up! Theatricality and the “Diphrelatic Art” in De Quincey’s English Mail-Coach, 6. Thomas De Quincey’s “Three-Fingered Jack”: The West Indian Origins of the “Dark Interpreter”, 7. The “Dark Problem” of Greek Tragedy: Sublimated Violence in De Quincey, Part 3. Gifts and Powers, 8. A Gift that Complicates Employ: Poetry and Poverty in “Resolution and Independence”, 9. The Literature of Power and the Imperial Will: De Quincey’s Opium-War Essays, 10. Wordsworth between God and Mammon: The Early “Spots of Time,”, and the Sublime as Sacramental Commodity, Part 4. Sites and Regions, 11. Detection as Method: Reconstructing the Past in Godwin and Freud, 12. Sacrificial Sites, Place-Keeping, and “Pre-History” in Wordsworth’s “Michael”, 13. Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan, Part 5. All in Your Head, 14. Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, “Ouzy” Tides and “Vagrant Dwellers” at Tintern, 1798, 15. “Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That”: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s “Chapman’s Homer” Sonnet, Bibliography, Index

Charles J. Rzepka is professor of English at Boston University, USA