A History of Victorian Literature

A History of Victorian Literature PDF Author: James Eli Adams
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470672390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Incorporating a broad range of contemporary scholarship, A History of Victorian Literature presents an overview of the literature produced in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, with fresh consideration of both major figures and some of the era's less familiar authors. Part of the Blackwell Histories of Literature series, the book describes the development of the Victorian literary movement and places it within its cultural, social and political context. A wide-ranging narrative overview of literature in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, capturing the extraordinary variety of literary output produced during this era Analyzes the development of all literary forms during this period - the novel, poetry, drama, autobiography and critical prose - in conjunction with major developments in social and intellectual history Considers the ways in which writers engaged with new forms of social responsibility in their work, as Britain transformed into the world's first industrial economy Offers a fresh perspective on the work of both major figures and some of the era’s less familiar authors Winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award, 2009

A History of Victorian Literature

A History of Victorian Literature PDF Author: James Eli Adams
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470672390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book

Book Description
Incorporating a broad range of contemporary scholarship, A History of Victorian Literature presents an overview of the literature produced in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, with fresh consideration of both major figures and some of the era's less familiar authors. Part of the Blackwell Histories of Literature series, the book describes the development of the Victorian literary movement and places it within its cultural, social and political context. A wide-ranging narrative overview of literature in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, capturing the extraordinary variety of literary output produced during this era Analyzes the development of all literary forms during this period - the novel, poetry, drama, autobiography and critical prose - in conjunction with major developments in social and intellectual history Considers the ways in which writers engaged with new forms of social responsibility in their work, as Britain transformed into the world's first industrial economy Offers a fresh perspective on the work of both major figures and some of the era’s less familiar authors Winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award, 2009

Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology

Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology PDF Author: Michael Wheeler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521306171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Death, judgement, heaven and hell - the four last things of Christian eschatology - have long been the subject of anxious speculation and fierce controversy, and never more so in the modern era than in Victorian Britain. In this major illustrated study, Michael Wheeler, a literary critic and cultural historian of the period, looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond. Wheeler's extensive analyses of each of the four last things and their part in nineteenth-century thought draw on a wide range of literary and theological writings from 1830 to 1890. He goes on to offer revisionary readings of four central literary texts, contrasting the broadly liberal theology of Tennyson's In Memoriam and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend with the Catholic authority invoked in Newman's The Dream of Gerontius and Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland. These writings are shown to reopen key theoretical questions which will stimulate fresh debate about the nature of religious experience, belief and language in the nineteenth century.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State PDF Author: Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

Victorian Life and Victorian Fiction

Victorian Life and Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Jo McMurtry
Publisher: Hamden, Conn. : Archon Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
McMurtry describes aspects of Victorian life: titles and social rank, fashions, heirarchies of servants, religious custom and controversy, politics, education, courtship and marriage, crime, money, and the whole system of subtle graded snobbery that is important for the understanding of social satire and comedy from the Victorian era.

This Victorian Life

This Victorian Life PDF Author: Sarah A. Chrisman
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1510700730
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Part memoir, part micro-history, this is an exploration of the present through the lens of the past. We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world? From Victorian beauty regimes to nineteenth-century bicycles, custard recipes to taxidermy experiments, oil lamps to an ice box, Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman decided to explore nineteenth-century culture and technologies from the inside out. Even the deepest aspects of their lives became affected, and the more immersed they became in the late Victorian era, the more aware they grew of its legacies permeating the twenty-first century. Most of us have dreamed of time travel, but what if that dream could come true? Certain universal constants remain steady for all people regardless of time or place. No matter where, when, or who we are, humans share similar passions and fears, joys and triumphs. In her first book, Victorian Secrets, Chrisman recalled the first year she spent wearing a Victorian corset 24/7. In This Victorian Life, Chrisman picks up where Secrets left off and documents her complete shift into living as though she were in the nineteenth century.

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Laura C. Berry
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813934570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

The Victorian Freak Show

The Victorian Freak Show PDF Author: Lillian Craton
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604976535
Category : Literary Criticism & Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.

The Crimson Petal and the White

The Crimson Petal and the White PDF Author: Michel Faber
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847678939
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 865

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Book Description
Yearning to escape her life of prostitution in 1870s London, Sugar finds her fate entangled in the complicated family life of patron William, an egotistical perfume magnate.

Inside the Victorian Home

Inside the Victorian Home PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393052091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings creates a rooms-by-room portrait of Victorian life--from childbirth in the master bedroom to separate gender domains in the drawing room and parlor.

How to be a Victorian

How to be a Victorian PDF Author: Ruth Goodman
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241958342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
TRAVEL BACK IN TIME WITH THE BBC'S RUTH GOODMAN We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner - like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Catch the omnibus to work and do the laundry in your corset? How to be a Victorian is a radical new approach to history; a journey back in time more personal than anything before, illuminating the overlapping worlds of health, sex, fashion, food, school, work and play. Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living and this book will show you how. ______________________ 'Goodman skilfully creates a portrait of daily Victorian life with accessible, compelling, and deeply sensory prose' Erin Entrada Kelly 'We're lucky to have such a knowledgeable cicerone as Ruth Goodman . . . Revelatory' Alexandra Kimball 'Goodman's research is impeccable . . . taking the reader through an average day and presenting the oddities of life without condescension' Patricia Hagen