Catherine Maxwell

This, the first collection of essays on the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, offers a wide range of critical writings by scholars. Key works are examined including Euphorion, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Music and Its Lovers . New light is shed on Lee's relationships with contemporaries such as Lee-Hamilton, Pater and Wilde.

The Law of Contract in South Africa, third edition, offers a concise, accessible and rigorous introduction to the general principles of contract law in South Africa. The text presents fundamental principles within a clear and applied framework, and supports independent, enquiring and critical engagement with the subject matter. The third edition introduces a stronger focus on the impact of the Constitution upon contract law, specifically in relation to good faith, equity and public policy in contract, unfair contracts and unfair enforcement of a contract, and contains a substantially reworked chapter on contractual interpretation in light of recent developments. The Law of Contract in South Africa is suited as core material for courses in contract law, at undergraduate or postgraduate level. It is also a useful resource for practitioners who may wish to engage with foundational and current principles of the field.

This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated identity, personality, or sensibility. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second Sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.

This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.

Best known for his sexually provocative Poems and Ballads (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was much admired throughout the 19th-century for his daring subject matter and superb poetic craftsmanship. After a decline in popularity in the twentieth century, his reputation has steadily recovered, and he is now becoming more widely read and studied. This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections - Poems and Ballads 1 (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Poems and Ballads 2 (1878), as well as a number of his most influential essays. Representative close readings of selected poems and essays reveal the often complex webs of reference and allusion which give his work depth and richness. Throughout, special emphasis is placed on the ways in which Swinburne challenges and compels his readers to move beyond their regular viewpoints to experience new insights and perspectives.

Best known for his sexually provocative Poems and Ballads (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was much admired throughout the 19th-century for his daring subject matter and superb poetic craftsmanship. After a decline in popularity in the twentieth century, his reputation has steadily recovered, and he is now becoming more widely read and studied. This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections - Poems and Ballads 1 (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Poems and Ballads 2 (1878), as well as a number of his most influential essays. Representative close readings of selected poems and essays reveal the often complex webs of reference and allusion which give his work depth and richness. Throughout, special emphasis is placed on the ways in which Swinburne challenges and compels his readers to move beyond their regular viewpoints to experience new insights and perspectives.