Tanya Agathocleous

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.

George Orwell (1903-1950) is remembered mainly as the author of two of the most powerful, cogent social critiques ever written: Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948). Less known is the turbulent life story of the popular novelist, from his birth in India as Eric Arthur Blair to his struggle to complete 1984 while suffering from tuberculosis, the disease that would kill him two years after the book's publication.

An original, independent spirit, Orwell chose an unusual career for an Eton graduate--he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Five years later, he came back to Europe and lived in both Paris and London, investigating the lives of the underprivileged and often sharing their experiences firsthand by living as a tramp. He fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War and simultaneously honed his writing skills while working as a journalist. Eventually he turned to writing as a full-time occupation, drawing on his varied experiences to recreate the precise details for which his novels are famous. Tanya Agathocleous's concise biography is enhanced by sidebars and picture captions which include numerous excerpts from Orwell's journalistic and literary writings. A final chapter explores Orwell's cultural legacy--his lasting contributions to freedom of thought throughout the world.

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.

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.