Click to Buy

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(co-written with Simon Avery, Longman, 2003)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most popular poets of her day in Britain and America and has become one of the great icons of Victorianism for the modern age. This book unravels the complex 'myths' which are associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and offers re-readings of her life and work, dispelling the myth of the ailing invalid poet-recluse and instead showing her to be one of the great intellectuals of her day, immersed in European history and politics from a very early age. The book provides readings of Barrett Browning’s poetry within a range of historical, political and cultural contexts enabling a fuller understanding of her poetry. It paints the portrait of a fine and innovative poet, an intellectual and an astute political thinker.

Click to Buy

Tennyson (Longman, 1996)

This collection of classic essays by writers such as James Eli Adams, Terry Eagleton and Isobel Armstrong covers the most significant areas of recent work on Tennyson, linking feminist and gender studies with deconstructive, psychoanalytic and linguistic theory. In the introduction Rebecca Stott discusses ways in which orthodox critical approaches have dominated readings of Tennyson's poetry and provides a guide to the new ways in which literary theory has shaped and is shaping new readings and opening up new questions and ends with a final discussion of the future directions which Tennyson criticism is likely to take.

Click to Buy

The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale (Macmillan, 1992; new edition 1996)

Originally a PhD thesis, this book examines the rise of the femme fatale figure as a dominant fictional type in late nineteenth-century British culture. Stott argues that all such stereotypes or reincarnations of much older archetypes are 'fabricated' for specific reasons, to express clusters of ideas or cultural or sexual preoccupations. The book argues that Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, Bram Stoker's female vampires and Conrad's destructive Malayan or African women, even Hardy's Tess, are all caught up in a series of late nineteenth-century contexts: biological determinism, imperialism, race, theories about female sexuality, degeneration and evolutionary theory.