Philip Davis’s The Victorians, a volume in the new Oxford English Literary History series, came out in 2002. He teaches at the University of Liverpool.
Roughly every ten years there was a crisis and an upheaval. In 1847, in his early twenties, he lost his faith, but in 1856 he converted to Catholicism. In 1865 he returned to Anglicanism, only to convert back to Catholicism in 1876. Each time this led to a change of scene: in 1847 from Oxford and London to New Zealand; in 1856 from New Zealand to Dublin and then Birmingham; in 1865 back to...
Having reached the grand age of 14, Elizabeth Barrett peered back into the distant past. She recorded in her journal that, when she was nine, ‘works of imagination only afforded me...
In Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, 23-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, ‘already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman’, makes a jaunty pilgrimage to the clapboard farmhouse...
Why are some people creative to the point of genius, even though they may not appear especially intelligent, or in any other way remarkable? Creativity is a long-standing puzzle which has...
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