Monsman, Gerald

About the author: Gerald Monsman taught at Duke University until joining the University of Arizona as Head of the English Department. He is currently a professor specializing in nineteenth-century British and Anglo-African literature. He has published criticism with Hopkins, Duke, Yale, and most recently has edited H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (Broadview 2002) and Walter Pater’s Gaston de Latour (ELT Press, 1995). His latest scholarly volumes have been Oxford University’s Old Mortality Society (Mellen, 1998) and Olive Schreiner’s Fiction (Rutgers, 1991).

Charles Lamb as the London Magazine’s “Elia”

2003 0-7734-6592-8
Examines Charles Lamb’s satiric exuberance as an important component of Romantic emotional intensity. Lamb’s essays comment importantly – and in ways not previously recognized – on the poetry of such major romantics as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, several of whom he knew personally. Lamb’s original essays in the London Magazine differ from their collected form in the Essays of Elia and have never been reprinted. This volume contains the original London Magazine essays, with Lamb’s original spelling, with commentary following.

Oxford University's Old Mortality Society a Study in Victorian Romanticism

1998 0-7734-8362-4
This study examines the views and conflicts of Queen Victoria's 'Age of Empire' concerning nature and society, the arts, personal identity and vocation, from the fresh perspective of educational practice, through scrutiny of an elite, organized group of Oxford University undergraduates who later pursued diverse professions in law and government, higher education and literature. Between 1856-1866 this essay society, call the Old Mortality, gained substantial renown within Oxford circles. This is the first book-length study on this group, whose membership included A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, A. V. Dicey, James Bryce, T. G. Green, J. A. Symonds, Edward Caird, S. P. Ilbert, and numerous other soon-to-be-eminent Victorians.