Gillian Beer: 6 books

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as...

First published in 1989, this book analyses fiction and long narrative, drawing on a broad range of writing from earlier periods and on recent narrative theory. Gillian Beer looks at the work of writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Philip Sydney, Samuel Richardson, and George Eliot. Three chapters...

Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how...

"'Interdisciplinarity' has dynamised the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between disciplines, between different artistic media,...

Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These acclaimed and challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Gillian Beer tracks encounters...

First published in 1970, this work provides an overview of the Romance from the medieval period to the 20th century and tracks how the genre has changed with time, including its interaction with other forms of literature such as gothic novels, realism and science fiction. It explores a myriad of writers...