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Author: James A. Secord
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022615825X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began. In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print. Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted. Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society
Author: James A. Secord
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022615825X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 645
Get Book
Book Description
Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began. In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print. Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted. Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society
Author: Michael Diamond
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 184331150X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A captivating look at the origins of our own tabloid culture in the salacious and titillating media of the Victorian era.
Author: Michael Diamond
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857287389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.
Author: D. Wynne
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023059672X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Victorian sensation novels, with their compulsive plots of crime, transgression and mystery, were bestsellers. Deborah Wynne analyses the fascinating relationships between sensation novels and the magazines in which they were serialized. Drawing upon the work of Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and Charles Reade, and such popular family journals as All The Year Round, The Cornhill, and Once a Week , the author highlights how novels and magazines worked together to engage in the major cultural and social debates of the period.
Author: David Sweeney Coombs
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."
Author: Kimberly Harrison
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210317
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
"Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers." "Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts' complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews the critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317093917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstruct and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.
Author: Jessica Cox
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030292908
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
This book represents the first full-length study of the relationship between neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. It examines the diverse and multiple legacies of Victorian popular fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, tracing their influence on a range of genres and works, including detective fiction, YA writing, Gothic literature, and stage and screen adaptations. In doing so, it forces a reappraisal of critical understandings of neo-Victorianism in terms of its origins and meanings, as well as offering an important critical intervention in popular fiction studies. The work traces the afterlife of Victorian sensation fiction, taking in the neo-Gothic writing of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt, contemporary popular historical detective and YA fiction by authors including Elizabeth Peters and Philip Pullman, and the literary fiction of writers such as Joanne Harris and Charles Palliser. The work will appeal to scholars and students of Victorian fiction, neo-Victorianism, and popular culture alike.
Author: Marilyn Brock
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786454407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Brontë. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.
Author: A. Mangham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286992
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
This book explores ideas of violent femininity across generic and disciplinary boundaries during the nineteenth century. It aims to highlight how medical, legal and literary narratives shared notions of the volatile nature of women. Mangham traces intersections between notorious legal trials, theories of female insanity, and sensation novels.
