Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (Oxford World's Classics)

Literature & Fiction

HORNUNG, E.W.

Daly, Nicholas

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This is a book about the long cultural shadow cast by a single bestselling novel, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), which introduced Ruritania, a colourful pocket kingdom. In this swashbuckling tale, Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates the king of Ruritania to foil a coup, but faces a dilemma when he falls for the lovely Princess Flavia. Hope's novel inspired stage and screen adaptations, place names, and even a board game, but it also launched a whole new subgenre, the "Ruritanian romance". The new form offered swordplay, royal romance, and splendid uniforms and gowns in such settings as Alasia, Balaria, and Cadonia. This study explores both the original appeal of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the extraordinary longevity and adaptability of the Ruritanian formula, which, it is argued, has been rooted in a lingering fascination with royalty, and the pocket kingdom's capacity to hold a looking glass up to Britain and later the United States. Individual chapters look at Hope's novel and its stage and film adaptations; at the forgotten American versions of Ruritania; at the chocolate-box principalities of the musical stage; at Cold War reworkings of the formula; and at Ruritania's recent reappearance in young adult fiction and made-for-television Christmas movies. The adventures of Ruritania have involved a diverse list of contributors, including John Buchan, P.G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ian Fleming among the writers; Sigmund Romberg and Ivor Novello among the composers; Erich Von Stroheim and David O. Selznick among the film-makers; and Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, and Anne Hathaway among the performers.

Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life." In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, an army doctor home on sick leave, for the first time. Through Watson we learn a little about the eccentric figure who is his new room-mate at 221B Baker Street, before they encounter their first case: an American visitor to the city has been killed in an empty house off the Brixton Road, and the only clue the police have is the mysterious word 'Rache', scrawled in blood-red letters on the wall. As Holmes sets to work with his unique forensic methods, behind the murder a tangled skein of love, religion, and revenge gradually unwinds, taking us from the streets of London to the Utah Territory, and back again. As Nicholas Daly's Introduction describes, out of this gripping tale grew the Holmes and Watson stories that would make Conan Doyle the best-paid author of his time. His creations have become household words, inspiring not only countless adaptations and imitations, but a Sherlock Holmes museum, Sherlock Holmes-themed pubs, and a whole array of Holmesian merchandise, from cushions to jigsaw puzzles. Here, though, we meet Holmes and Watson before they became famous, and we can see how their extraordinary impact on our popular culture derives from the late-Victorian world from which they emerge.

A Study in Scarlet (Oxford World's Classics)

Jones, Darryl

Conan, Doyle Arthur

Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the "romance revival" of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on authors such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, Daly argues that these adventure narratives provided a narrative of cultural change at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the "new imperialism." The presence of a genre such as romance within modernism, he claims, should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash", or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.

Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000

Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the "romance revival" of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on authors such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, Daly argues that these adventure narratives provided a narrative of cultural change at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the "new imperialism." The presence of a genre such as romance within modernism, he claims, should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this 'Leap in the Dark', authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urban and more anonymous. While some fantasized about ways of capturing and holding the attention of the masses, others preferred to make art and literature more exclusive, to shut out the crowd. One path led to 'Sensation'; the other to aestheticism, though there were also efforts to evade this opposition. This book examines the fiction, drama, fine art, and ephemeral forms of these years against the backdrop of Reform. Authors and artists studied include Wilkie Collins, Dion Boucicault, Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, and the popular illustrator, Alfred Concanen.

Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 70)

Writing for scholars of modernism, literature, and film, Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. Although modernity assumes that there is a difference between people and machines, a consequence of this belief has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the "crash", or collision, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical.

In this provocative book, Nicholas Daly tracks the cultural effects of the population explosion of the nineteenth century, the 'demographic transition' to the modern world. As the crowded cities of Paris, London and New York went through similar transformations, a set of shared narratives and images of urban life circulated among them, including fantasies of urban catastrophe, crime dramas, and tales of haunted public transport, refracting the hell that is other people. In the visual arts, sentimental genre pictures appeared that condensed the urban masses into a handful of vulnerable figures: newsboys and flower-girls. At the end of the century, proto-ecological stories emerge about the sprawling city as itself a destroyer. This lively study excavates some of the origins of our own international popular culture, from noir visions of the city as a locus of crime, to utopian images of energy and community.

The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 97)

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Books by Daly, Nicholas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Daly, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (Oxford World's Classics)

Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries

A Study in Scarlet (Oxford World's Classics)

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 70)

Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000

The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 97)

The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 97)