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A literary criticism is presented of the 2001 British fictional book "Atonement," by Ian McEwan. Particular focus is given to the protagonist Briony Tallis's efforts to have her writing published, including in regard to the English literary critic (the author mixes this nonfictional person in his fiction) Cyril Connolly's rejection letter that responded to Briony's efforts to have her short story published in the (nonfiction) magazine "Horizon." The turning points in the novel are discussed.

The article discusses the ways in which British travel to Belgium in the early-19th century helped develop the overall Continental European travel industry and, more specifically, English-language travel writing. The author argues against conventional wisdom stating that author John Murray III created the first useful travel guide in 1836 by analyzing less well-known guidebooks published between 1815 and 1836. A rise in British tourists traveling through Belgium during this period is explained, and notes the proliferation of both guidebooks and travel accounts (diaries, letters, etc.).

This paper reads Charles Dickens's "The Chimes" through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's study of class ethics and his problematization of working-class disinterest. Arguing that nineteenth-century British literature tends to characterize working people as either obsessed by financial schemes or economically disinterested, it suggests that Bourdieu's non-dualistic epistemology can change the way we understand class in literature, and indeed in any discipline that offers images of working people along the lines of an economic/ethical split. Bourdieu's way of seeing economic practices in ostensibly non-economic activity, while seeing in that economic activity a deep stratum of ethics, rectifies representations or interpretations of class where a simple working-class pragmatism that capitulates to the economic alternates with an inherent working-class moral superiority. Dickens's Christmas story, "The Chimes," is interpreted using Bourdieu's materialist ideas so as to model how other representations of class can be rethought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]