Agathocleous, Tanya
Agathocleous, Tanya
Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination
- Year: 2003
- Publisher / Date: Cambridge University Press, 2011
This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century – including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad – explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism – the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world – to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.
The Secret Agent
- Year: 2003
- Publisher / Date: Broadview Press - New Critical Edition, 2009
The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with a group of international anarchists but reports on their activities to both the Russian embassy and the British government. As he is drawn further into a terrorist bombing plot, his family also becomes involved, with devastating consequences. Based on a real-life failed anarchist plot, The Secret Agent is both intimately engaged with its historical moment and profoundly relevant today.
This new Broadview Edition helps to recreate the historical context that informed Conrad's preoccupations with global terrorism, human degeneration, the relativity of time, and the position of women.
Teaching Literature: A Companion
- Year: 2003
- Publisher / Date: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 (Ann Dean, Co-Editor)
In Teaching Literature scholars explain how they think about their everyday experience in the classroom, using the tools of their ongoing scholarly projects and engaging with current debates in literary studies. Until recently, teaching has played second fiddle to literary research as a mode of knowledge in academia, leaving new teachers with nowhere to turn for advice about teaching and no forum for discussion of the difficulties and opportunities they face in the classroom.