“She is the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England . . . the first legitimate fruit of our modern atheistic pietism,” declared W. H. Mallock in 1879 as he reviewed Impressions of Theophrastus Such (CH, 453-54). In a century of so many doubters, Mallock exaggerates; but he also sees George Eliot's crucial place - even more than Thomas Carlyle's - as (in Lord Acton's words about her) “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief” (CH, 463). Her Maggie Tulliver and Esther Lyon and Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth are women in search of a vision, of a faith that might sustain and give their lives purpose. But the words that sustained the Bible's Hebrews and Bunyan's pilgrim, that mapped their journeys towards the Promised Land, offer no sure guides. Silas Marner finds his belief in the Bible's truth destroyed by a drawing of lots in the name of what Bunyan called that “book that cannot lie”;Maggie Tulliver, not even reading the Bible, finds no aid - and finally drowns because of it. Silas lives; the hand of a little child leads him “towards a calm and bright land”- in “merry England” (14:130; 1:5).

George Eliot began her career as a novelist in a frenzy of activity, producing from the start works of exceptional quality for a novice. After the initial publication in serial form in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of the three stories that would make up Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, her first works of fiction were published at the rate of almost one a year: Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (published serially in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862, and in three volumes by Smith, Elder, in 1863). In addition, she also published her novella, “The Lifted Veil,” in Blackwood's in 1859, and wrote a second novella, “Brother Jacob,” in 1860, although this was not published until 1864. While the rate of production in what we might think of as the second part of this career was certainly intense (six works of fiction and poetry over thirteen years), in comparison with the first it seems almost leisurely. Just five years into the novelist's career, then, the critic Richard Simpson was already in a position to write a retrospective review. In this, Simpson conveys the impact George Eliot's fiction had made on the reading public when it first appeared: “Readers who in 1858 took up the Scenes of Clerical Life . . . with the languid expectancy with which the first writings of new novelists are received, were astonished that, instead of an author, they had found a man” (CH, 221).

George Eliot conducted her prosperous career as a novelist during a fortunate moment in the history of literary publishing in Britain. In the 1840s a generation of novelists somewhat older than Eliot - Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Brontë - had found and enlarged an audience of readers to whom fiction became a principal form, even a habit, of entertainment. By midcentury a group of well-managed and solidly capitalized publishing firms had emerged whose proprietors could pay high prices for novels they thought would be popular and who had the resources, if they guessed right, to keep novels in print, and their authors' names before the public, through successively cheaper editions. Magazines like the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round (edited by Dickens) and the monthly Cornhill Magazine (edited by Thackeray), many of them founded in the middle of the century, used serialized fiction as a principal attraction in their competition for readers. Fiction was also a mainstay of subscription or lending libraries, at the height of their popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, from which by payment of an annual fee readers borrowed books, magazines, and the separately published installments of novels. Mudie's Select Library added almost a million volumes between 1853 and 1862, about half of them fiction, and the purchases by Mudie's and other libraries of hundreds and sometimes a thousand or more copies of three-volume editions of novels assured publishers of a profit on their first printings and made fiction accessible to the many readers unable or unwilling to buy these expensive (31 shillings and 6 pence) books.

Post-war Italian intellectual culture can be analysed by way of three distinct yet overlapping phases. The first period – 1944 to 1968 – is characterised mainly by a drive by intellectuals to establish Marxism as the dominant critical theory. During this period, against opposing ideas from the centre (Crocean liberal secularism and catholic modernity) and the right of centre (conservative Catholicism), Marxism increasingly came to dominate the public sphere; so much so indeed that influential intellectual currents – phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, positivism, existentialism, textual criticism, Neo-Hegelianism, structural linguistics – looked to Marxist ideas as points of reference against which to set themselves off. 1968 was the year which signalled the triumph of Marxism in Italy; a second period, lasting from 1968 to 1986, was marked by a massive production of cultural knowledge from within the Marxist paradigm. However, it was also characterised by an increasing fragmentation of the left. As a result, it was during this period that turbulent struggles arose between various Marxist forces.

This fragmentation also created a space for the re-emergence of philosophical theories inspired by Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas and others that opposed Marxist interpretations of history, the subject and agency. Thus, the third period, from 1986 to 1999, witnessed a dismantling of the Marxist project to the extent that positions derived from French postmodernism gradually displaced Marxism altogether. It was also during this last phase that Italy's cultural politics – which had previously been organised in relation to modernist notions, such as the territorial state, high cultures and national identities – were gradually opened up to new conceptions of culture, reflecting an increasing awareness of global issues.

The title of this chapter puts in roughly historical order related types of criticism that concentrate on varieties of what might be loosely termed sexual dissidence. All of these labels emerge from dynamic mid- and late twentieth-century struggles to emancipate anti-normative sexual desires and gender identities from legal, medical and moral oppression. The word gay, for example – if traceable to male homosexual parlance of the Victorian era – became a politically charged term around which the short-lived Gay Liberation Front (GLF) of the late 1960s and early 1970s could mobilise demonstrations, festivals and marches that celebrated same-sex desires. Repudiating the clinical and pathological connotations often attached to the category homosexual (in use from at least the 1890s onwards), the GLF upheld gay as an expression of pride in those desires between persons of the same sex that western cultures had for centuries outlawed and punished. In the annals of sexual history, GLF came into its own after the police attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located inGreenwich Village at New York City, on 27 June 1969. Rather than succumb to police harassment, the Stonewall's customers fought back at the authorities for two nights. Soon referred to simply as Stonewall, this upsurge of militancy immediately provoked – in John D'Emilio's words – ‘intense discussion of what many had begun to memorialise as the first gay riot in history’.

Spreading rapidly across the United States, the GLF soon established itself in other western nations such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. This movement derived its political energy from a broad repertoire of socialist and leftist thought that energised Civil Rights groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), in North America.

Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as critiques of the idea of the centred subject and of a stable field of knowledge have been voiced. One critic has referred to its ‘history of complicity variously with racism and slavery … its readiness to facilitate colonial governance’. Another has asserted: ‘Every focus excludes: there is no politically innocent methodology for inter-cultural interpretation.’ These questions have occupied prominent thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida. Anthropology is seen as upholding a privileged position whereby the dominant codes of western culture, including patriarchy and imperialism, survey, classify and govern the cultures of the east, the third world, of people of colour, women and those of different sexual preferences. As such, the discipline appears to perpetuate the same/other binary that is a part of the logocentric tradition of western culture. These matters will be discussed in the course of this essay. To begin with, I will present a brief summary of the relation of anthropology to literary criticism during this century.

Anthropological criticism came into sharp prominence during the early years of the twentieth century. The Cambridge school of classical anthropology took up the work of Sir James Frazer and applied the methods of his magnum opus, The Golden Bough, to the study of Greek drama. The conclusions of this loosely knit group of scholars and writers, sometimes known as the ‘ritualists’ (Jane Harrison, F. M. Cornford, A. B. Cook and Gilbert Murray), were that a pre-history of myth and ritual is present in Greek drama. Classical drama was thus read as a displaced narrative of much older, pagan ceremonial forms.

From his own day to ours, Keats - as a poet and as a person - has provoked questions about gender, about what it means to be a male or a female poet, about the nature of masculinity and femininity. Hazlitt first raised this issue in 1822, in his essay “On Effeminacy of Character.” Defining “effeminacy” as “a prevalence of the sensibility over the will,”“a want of fortitude,” a desire for “ease and indolence,” and an obsession with the sensations of the moment - as opposed to a “manly firmness and decision of character” - Hazlitt then suggested that there was a corresponding literary style, citing Keats's poetry as a primary example: “all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness.” He concluded,

Numerous contemporary reviewers agreed that Keats’s poetry was effeminate, juvenile, or puerile. Writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1818, “Z.” first defined Keats as a “Cockney” poet (vol. 3, 519), slang for an inferior, lower-class Londoner, with connotations of immaturity and effeminacy. It became his theme. In Blackwood’s January 1826 he was still describing Keats as an “infatuated bardling” who wrote “a species of emasculated pruriency that [. . .] looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse” (vol. 19, xvi, xxvi).

It is richly ironic that Keats's medical training, once cited as a sign of his low cultural standing, has been credited in recent scholarship for the precision and intellectual sophistication of Keats's response to the momentous scientific and medical developments of his era. “So back to the shop Mr John,” Blackwood's ”Z.” sarcastically concluded a notorious attack on Keats as a “Cockney”poet, mocking him as an “uneducated and flimsy stripling” in the grip of “mania” and “malady,” who would do better as a “starving apothecary than a starved poet.” “Z.”knew that Keats had been an apprentice to an apothecary-surgeon - the standard way for those without university educations to enter medical practice - and his review evoked the dated stereotype of the quackish, low-status apothecary, dispensing “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” (524) with knowledge gained mainly from haphazard, hands-on experience. What “Z.” ignored (and recent scholarship has painstakingly established) is that Keats became a licensed apothecary at a time when medical education was undergoing significant reform, completing his training at Guy's, one of the most advanced teaching hospitals. Having earned a reputation at Enfield Academy for a brilliant, probing, and retentive mind, Keats found himself at Guy's, an institution that was helping to reshape the profession of medicine with the latest currents in scientific thought. How did this experience mark Keats's thinking and writing?

The term ‘feminism’ first emerged in the English language in the 1890s, a significant historical moment when there was an urgent need to name the activities of the women's movement, which was vibrant and popular as never before. Late nineteenth-century feminism joined together women from different classes and social backgrounds. Although the initial enthusiasm was to be dampened and many found their interests ignored by the politics adopted by the leading figures, it achieved the status of a social movement. While more recent feminist criticism warns against understanding ‘women’ as a homogenous category and emphasises the mistake of eradicating the unique characteristics of different groupings, in the late nineteenth century the emergence of a solidarity across national and class barriers was perceived as so novel that the common factor of being a woman was perceived as outweighing the differences. Among other things, the working conditions of female labourers were so appalling that the primary objective was to strive for some improvement: for instance pregnant women were not infrequently forced to work right up to the delivery of the baby and indeed sometimes gave birth in the factory itself. Like any politically oriented movement, the women's movements which formed in different national settings had to deal with the grossest social injustices of their daily experience; only then could it begin to think about equal rights among its members.

A theoretical engagement with the claims and rights of women concentrated on representation, both in the sense of protesting against political dis-enfranchisement and challenging the insidious power of literature to propagate views about women's inferiority. This chapter examines the development of feminist criticism in the twentieth century. It begins with a review of early twentieth-century feminism (first-wave feminism) and then provides a detailed account of second-wave feminism, illustrating different critiques of observed instances of women’s oppression.

What kind of topic is this? What else is there? Language in Keats: that wouldn't get us where we need to go, either. Keats in language? Up to his ears in language. Some writers in English, some very few, have written more brilliantly. None has worded more gorgeously. Vowels are for Keats a passion, consonants an ecstasy, syntax a life force. Okay, then: Keats in language. And we respond in kind. There is no way to approach Keats with mere close reading. Proximity breeds immersion. Like his verse, reading operates from the inside out, silent music rippling with inference.

So rapt by the syllables of English verse was Keats that even (or especially) at his most aching, gripped by mortality and stung by frustrated ambition, his words often become his theme. Ideally wielded, they heal. In the process, they become his diagnosed means as well. Trained as a physician, selfschooled as a poet, Keats was an intuitive anatomist of language, its closely articulated skeletal structure, its ligaments and fibers, its muscular tensions and release, its rhythmic corridors of breath – while also a genetic specialist in its origins and mutations. With pen rather than stethoscope, he took the phonetic pulse of his every word through the listening ear of script.

Since the 1960s the discipline of cultural studies has taken root throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. It has developed a wide range of approaches to the study of culture which are usually characterised by attention to political, ideological, social and historical factors, in particular the relationship between culture and power. In the course of its development cultural studies has challenged established cultural canons and disciplinary boundaries and has focused attention on those aspects of culture which have been excluded by longer established humanities disciplines. Thus, for example, cultural studies has looked extensively at cultural theory, popular culture and the media. The development of cultural studies, in its turn, has influenced other disciplines, for example, literary studies, encouraging a more inclusive approach to the range of texts studied and greater attention to theory, context and the institutions that constitute the literary discursive field.

Since the late 1960s cultural studies has become an established international discipline, yet its early roots are to be found in Britain, where they are closely intertwined with the development of literary studies. In its formative years cultural studies defined itself both in relation to and against what is known in Britain as the ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition, i.e. that tradition of English literary and cultural criticism that begins with Matthew Arnold in the 1860s.

For Arnold, culture was an explicitly political question, directly linked to class relations in nineteenth-century Britain. With the expansion of literacy among the working classes, the implementation of compulsory elementary education and the rise of trade unionism, social unrest and even social revolution increasingly came to be seen as real threats to existing social relations.