Library digitization has made more than 100,000 nineteenth-century English-language books available to the public. Do the books that have been digitized reflect the population of published books? An affirmative answer would allow book and literary historians to use holdings of major digital libraries as proxies for the population of published…

The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the…

This article charts the similarities between the first short story appearance in 1839 of what later became Cirilo Villaverde's well-known nineteenth-century novel, "Cecilia Valdés" (1882), and Anselmo Suárez y Romero's "Carlota Valdés" (1838). The study considers the circle of influence in Cuba for writers during this time…

Graded readers, simplified versions of literature and other texts at graduated levels of difficulty, are widely employed in contexts of foreign language pedagogy and are widely considered to be a form of written-language input ostensibly suitable for a wide array of developmental stages. However, the efficacy of graded readers is not unchallenged,…

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

"When I have fears that I may cease to be", by John Keats, portrays the poet's fear of dying young and being unable to fulfill his ideal as a writer and loses his beloved. Based on the use of sensuous imagery, it is clear that visual image dominates the use of imagery and there are two major thought groups: 1) Keats expresses his fear of…

An independent and strong-minded woman gains control of a farm and determines to effect its fruition. Though many doubt her capacity, the female landowner trumps her male counterparts when the farm flourishes under her effective management. In the end, she marries--but on extremely unconventional terms. Rejecting romantic love, she instead weds a…

Examines self-help medical literature in 19th-century Canada. Shows that while authors repeatedly called for "plain" language in contrast to mysterious terminology employed by medical practitioners, comparison of their style with that of medical textbook authors reveals few real differences. Concludes that the posture adopted by Canadian…

This study discusses the preaching of William Ellery Channing and Theordore Parker as it contributed to the theological development of American intellectual life. Employing Cathcart's concept of "dialectical enjoinment," this study suggests that Channing and Parker exerted a restricted emphasis because communication with the larger…

Describes and reports on a survey of 164 U.S. universities to ascertain what is taught as the current canon of British Romantic literature. Asserts that the canon may now include Mary Shelley with the former standard six major male Romantic poets, indicating a significant emergence of a feminist perspective on British Romanticism in the classroom.…

Examines the readability levels of two current children's periodicals and two nineteenth-century periodicals. Finds the language skills used by children writing poetry and letters to the editor have not declined over the last century. Finds nonfiction and recreational fiction articles to be more difficult in the nineteenth century. (RS)

Rural working-class women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are rarely heard from as writers. The letters and diaries of such women that are available give virtually no information about culture, politics, or the arts, and they practically never contain an opinion. Instead, they provide minute, repetitive observations, with…

Reviews the use of humor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black Creole Jamaican literature and song. Concludes that irony is inherent in the creative expression of early Jamaicans and writers about Jamaica, arising from inconsistencies of attitudes of Blacks toward Whites and toward themselves. (FMW)

Investigates whether novelistic prose can be dated by considering marked stylistic changes that occurred over the past 240 years. Finds a positive correlation between publication date and stylistic markers of sentence length, word length, rare punctuation, and word shortening or informality. Argues that this process can form the basis for new…

Discusses 19th-century novels and stories that depicted the social condition and psychological problems of children and played an important role in arousing concern for children at a time when they had virtually no rights or protection. Works discussed reflect prevailing child-care attitudes and practices, and contributed to hostile stereotype of…