Thomas Recchio Libri

The book explores the publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, highlighting its serialization in Dickens's Household Words and subsequent adaptations. It emphasizes how the text has been utilized to promote concepts of nation and national identity in both England and the United States. Utilizing primary materials, the author presents a detailed micro-history that illustrates the positioning of English literature within an Anglocentric cultural framework, revealing its impact on cultural identity across the Atlantic.

Although she is remembered today mainly as a writer of children's books, Frances Hodgson Burnett was a widely published novelist. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post-World War I novels. They were popular subjects in the early years of cinema. "The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett" reads Burnett's novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War.