Victorian Skin

Victorian Skin PDF Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

Victorian Skin

Victorian Skin PDF Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

Victorian Skin

Victorian Skin PDF Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

A Victorian Lady's Guide to Fashion and Beauty

A Victorian Lady's Guide to Fashion and Beauty PDF Author: Mimi Matthews
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526705060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
“Meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated . . . indispensable to anyone interested in the era.” —Tasha Alexander, New York Times–bestselling author of the Lady Emily series What did a Victorian lady wear for a walk in the park? How did she style her hair for an evening at the theater? And what products might she have used to soothe a sunburn or treat an unsightly blemish? USA Today-bestselling author Mimi Matthews answers these questions and more as she takes readers on a decade-by-decade journey through Victorian fashion and beauty history. Women’s clothing changed dramatically during the course of the Victorian era. Necklines rose, waistlines dropped, and Gothic severity gave way to flounces and frills. Sleeves ballooned up and skirts billowed out. The crinoline morphed into the bustle and steam-molded corsets cinched women’s waists ever tighter. As fashion evolved, so too did trends in ladies’ hair care and cosmetics. An era which began by prizing natural, barefaced beauty ended with women purchasing lip and cheek rouge, false hairpieces and pomades, and fashionable perfumes. Using research from nineteenth-century beauty books, fashion magazines, and lady’s journals, the author of the Parish Orphans of Devon series brings Victorian fashion into modern day focus—and offers a glimpse of the social issues that influenced women’s clothing and the outrage that was a frequent response to those bold females who used fashion and beauty to assert their individuality and independence. “An elegant resource that I will be reaching for again and again.”—Deanna Raybourn, New York Times-bestselling author of the Veronica Speedwell novels

Compacts and Cosmetics

Compacts and Cosmetics PDF Author: Madeleine Marsh
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473822947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Cosmetics have been used to increase attraction since Ancient times whilst Compacts have been a symbol of love for generations but especially since the 1920s. In this fascinating book, vintage accessories expert, Madeleine Marsh, discusses just what makes compacts so desirable and reveals their hidden secrets from cameras to cigarettes. Madeleine shows what to buy and where, what to spot when buying and how to make the most of your compacts, vintage cosmetics or beauty accessories."

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030753972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Ann C. Colley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134766459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch where one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118624491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
A NEW COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new Companion surveys seven decades of history before examining the key phases in a Victorian life, the leading professions and walks of life, the major literary genres, the way Victorians defined their persons, homes, and national identity, and how recent “neo-Victorian” developments in contemporary culture reconfigure the sense we make of the past today. Important topics such as sexuality, denominational faith, social class, and global empire inform each chapter’s approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive bibliography of established and emerging scholarship.

Victorian Material Culture

Victorian Material Culture PDF Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315399962
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, ‘Fashionable Things’, will focus on Victorian fads and fashions ranging from chatelains to insect jewellery.

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118624483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new companion surveys seven decades of history before examining the keys phases in a Victorian life, the leading professions and walks of life, the major Victorian literary genres, and the way Victorians defined their persons, their homes, and their national identities. Important topics such as sexuality, denominational faith, social class, and global empire inform each chapter’s approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive bibliography of established and emerging scholarship.

Dark Archives

Dark Archives PDF Author: Megan Rosenbloom
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717427
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.