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

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

• 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

'It is a testament to the achievements of all three scholars that Rzepka’s occasional dialogue with their interpretations produces these wonderfully enlightening interventions and excellent documentation of the inventiveness of Rzepka’s mind.' Studies in Romanticism '... [Rzepka offers a] high level of integrity, literary sensitivity, historical thoroughness, and engaging eloquence...' The Wordsworth Circle