David Morse (born 1938) is a British literary author and former lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. [1] [2] [3] He was an early authority on Motown [4] [5] [6] but is now best known for his work on Romanticism and the culture and times of the Victorian age. His seminal work, High Victorian Culture, was described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘an illuminating survey work by a robust and powerful intelligence with an impressive grasp of a great deal of material’. [7] [8] [9] [10]
David Morse was born in 1938 and educated at Bedford Modern School [11] and King's College, Cambridge, where he contributed to Granta , was editor of The Cambridge Review [1] and was awarded an ACLS Fellowship to study American theatre. [1]
Morse became a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. [11] He was an early authority on Motown [4] [5] [6] but is now best known for his work on Romanticism and the culture and times of the Victorian age. His seminal work, High Victorian Culture, was described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘an illuminating survey work by a robust and powerful intelligence with an impressive grasp of a great deal of material’. [7] [8] [9] [10]
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival, and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
Romantic music is a stylistic movement in Western Classical music associated with the period of the 19th century commonly referred to as the Romantic era. It is closely related to the broader concept of Romanticism—the intellectual, artistic and literary movement that became prominent in Western culture from approximately 1798 until 1837.
Peter Russell-Clarke is an Australian chef, cookbook writer, illustrator and media personality
Studies in Classic American Literature is a work of literary criticism by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It was first published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. The British edition was published in June 1924 by Martin Secker.
Post-romanticism or Postromanticism refers to a range of cultural endeavors and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism.
John Henry Clifford was an American lawyer and politician from New Bedford, Massachusetts. He served as the state's attorney general for much of the 1850s, retaining the office during administrations dominated by three different political parties. A Whig, he was elected the state's 21st governor, serving a single term from 1853 to 1854. He was the first governor of Massachusetts not born in the state.
"Isle of the Cross" is a possible unpublished and lost work by Herman Melville, which would have been his eighth book, coming after the commercial and critical failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). Melville biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the work, perhaps a novel, perhaps a story, was what had been known as the "story of Agatha," completed around May 1853. He further suggests that finishing the work showed that Melville had not, as many biographers argued, been discouraged and turned away from fiction.
The Knickerbocker Group was a somewhat indistinct group of 19th-century American writers. Its most prominent members included Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant. Each was a pioneer in general literature—novels, poetry and journalism.
Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland and the United States and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) is an essay and critical review by Herman Melville of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1846. Published pseudonymously by "a Virginian spending July in Vermont", it appeared in The Literary World magazine in two issues: August 17 and August 24, 1850. It has been called the "most famous literary manifesto of the American nineteenth century."
Arthur Hugh Chaplin was an English librarian who was Principal Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum. He was a prolific author in the fields of librarianship and cataloguing, working hard to achieve an international standard for cataloguing through participation in the major international conferences of his time.
Arthur Sheppard (1862–1944) was private secretary to Archbishop Davidson, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1902 to 1928.
Stephen Wildman is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Lancaster and Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre.
George Moreby Acklom, was a British writer, editor, literary adviser and critic based in New York City, principally with the publisher E.P. Dutton, and the father of the Hollywood actor David Manners.
Neil Wynn Williams was a British novelist, writer and contributor of short stories and articles to the periodicals and journals of his time.
Michael Toner is a British journalist. He was political editor, diplomatic correspondent and leader writer at the Sunday Express, chief leader writer on the Daily Mail until 2006, a political author and novelist.
Frederick George "Derick" Emmison was a British archivist, author and historian. He was County Archivist for Bedfordshire between 1925 and 1938, County Archivist for Essex between 1938 and 1969, a founder member of the British Records Association and the Society of Archivists, and a winner of the John Bickersteth Medal in 1974 and the Medlicott Medal in 1987. He was also a prolific author who made a significant contribution to our understanding of the Elizabethan era through close analysis of the minutiae of local records of that age in Essex.
Donald Charles Riddy CBE was a British linguist and educationalist. After the Second World War, he was the British Controller-General of the Education Branch, Control Commission for German - British Element, tasked with assisting the de-nazification of Germany through a process of re-education. He was later co-ordinator of the Council of Europe Modern Languages Programme and, for most of his career, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Modern Languages in Schools. He was described as a man of ‘wide administrative experience and enormous energy, for whom material difficulties were a challenge which he met with enthusiasm’.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".