Rossetti S Wombat

Rossetti's Wombat tells the story of Top, a wombat who belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti for a few months in 1869. The book also describes the strange history of the European fascination with the wildlife of Australia, from the late 18th century onwards. By 1860, most well-to-do people could buy a pet kangaroo from a London pet shop - and many of them did. Wombats were rarer and more expensive but the tradition of wombat owning was well established by the turn of the 19th century. Napoleon had a pet wombat, as did the Duke of Edinburgh. Rossetti's Wombat is a light-hearted account of an improbable side of Victorian England. It examines the way a wombat participated in the delicate relationships between the men and women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle - particularly Rossetti's emotional affair with Jane Morris, wife of his friend and colleague William Morris. Fully illustrated with drawings and etchings of the period, Rossetti's Wombat will appeal to those with an interest in Victorian England and the Pre-Raphaelites - and to wombat lovers everywhere. John Simons is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Media, Humanities and Technology at the University of Lincoln. He has published widely on subjects ranging from medieval chivalric romance to Andy Warhol, and from editions of medieval and early modern texts to a history of Hampshire cricket.

Whitley Award winner for Best Popular Zoology Book. With his usual brilliance James Woodford explores the wombat's bizarre evolutionary history and perilous future. This is popular science writing at its best: an irresistible subject in the hands of an irrepressible author.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.

While still a student at Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones formed a friendship and made a renunciation that would shape art history. The friendship was with William Morris, with whom he would occupy the social and intellectual center of the era's cult of beauty. The renunciation was of his intention to enter the clergy, when he-together with Morris-vowed to throw over the Church in favor of art. In Fiona MacCarthy's riveting account of Burne-Jones's life, that exchange of faith for art places him at the intersection of the nineteenth century and the Modern, as he leads us forward from Victorian mores and attitudes to the psychological, sexual, and artistic audacity that would characterize the early twentieth century. In MacCarthy's hands, Burne-Jones emerges as a great visionary painter, a master of mystic reverie, and a pivotal late nineteenth-century cultural and artistic figure. Lavishly illustrated with color plates, The Last Pre-Raphaelite shows that Burne-Jones's influence extended far beyond his own circle to Freudian Vienna and the delicately gilded erotic dream paintings of Gustav Klimt, the Swiss Symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler, and the young Pablo Picasso and the Catalan painters. Drawing on extensive research, MacCarthy offers a fresh perspective on the achievement of Burne-Jones, a precursor to the Modern, and tells the dramatic, fascinating story of this peculiarly captivating and elusive man.

A rollicking history of Australia's amateur naturalists, from settlement to the present ‘A fascinating history of Australia’s wildlife and the wilder men and women who shot, studied and saved it … Compelling and entertaining.’ —David Hunt Of Marsupials and Men recounts the fascinating and often hilarious history of the men and women who dedicated their lives to understanding Australia’s native animals. To the first European colonists, Australian wildlife was bewildering. Marsupials and gum trees seemed strange and hostile; rabbits, sheep and oak trees were familiar and safe. A bustling animal trade soon developed in both directions: foxes, starlings and other reminders of ‘home’ were unleashed on the Australian landscape, while countless Australian animals found themselves in Europe as stuffed specimens or living curiosities in zoos and private collections. Into this picture stepped a remarkable band of enthusiastic amateurs who were determined to get to know the fauna of the new colony. Equal parts inspiring and outlandish, over the next 150 years they would advance scientific understanding and transform public attitudes to Australian wildlife. From the ‘snake men’ who fearlessly thrust their arms into hollow logs just to see what might happen, to the top-secret plan to smuggle a platypus to Winston Churchill at the height of World War II, these are their stories.

What happens to poets' genius when they die? The peculiar affinity which was felt to exist between their physical and literary 'remains' - their bodies and books - is the subject of this original cultural study, which concentrates on poets and poetry from the Romantic to late Victorian period. Poetical Remains deals with issues such as the place of burial, the kind of monument deemed appropriate, the poet's 'last words' and last poems, the creation of memorial volumes, and thecommercial boost given to a poet's reputation by 'celebrity death', focussing in each case on the powerful, complex, often unstated but ever-present connections between the poet's body and their poetic 'corpus'. As well as the works of the poets themselves, Matthews draws on contemporary biography andmemoirs, family correspondence, newspaper reports, and tribute verse among other texts, and places the literature of poetic death in its social, material, and affective context: the conflict between the idealized 'country churchyard' and the secular urban cemetery, the ideal of private, familial burial as against the pressure for public ceremony, the recuperation of death-in-exile as an extension of national pride, transactions between spiritual and material, poetic and pragmatic, in asecularizing age.Some of the most poignant and darkly comic moments in nineteenth-century literary history arose around the deathbeds of poets and the events which followed their deaths. What happened to Shelley's heart, and to Thomas Hood's monument; the different fates which dictated that the first Poet Laureate appointed by Queen Victoria, Wordsworth, was buried in his family plot in Grasmere, while her second, Tennyson, was wrested from his family's grasp and interred in Westminster Abbey - these are someof the stories which Matthews tells, and which are bound up in a sustained and powerful argument about the way in which our culture deals with artists and their work on the boundary between life and death.

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.