Download or read book Excavating Victorians written by Virginia Zimmerman and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Victorians reacted to the new sciences of geology and archaeology.
Download or read book Neo Victorianism and Sensation Fiction written by Jessica Cox and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Neo Victorian Literature and Culture written by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.
Download or read book Victorian Alchemy written by Eleanor Dobson and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Alchemy explores nineteenth-century conceptions of ancient Egypt as this extant civilisation was being ‘rediscovered’ in the modern world. With its material remnants somewhat paradoxically symbolic of both antiquity and modernity (in the very currentness of Egyptological excavations), ancient Egypt was at once evocative of ancient magical power and of cutting-edge science, a tension that might be productively conceived of as ‘alchemical’. Allusions to ancient Egypt simultaneously lent an air of legitimacy to depictions of the supernatural while projecting a sense of enchantment onto representations of cutting-edge science. Examining literature and other cultural forms including art, photography and early film, Eleanor Dobson traces the myriad ways in which magic and science were perceived as entwined, and ancient Egypt evoked in parallel with various fields of study, from imaging technologies and astronomy, to investigations into the electromagnetic spectrum and the human mind itself. In so doing, counter to linear narratives of nineteenth-century progress, and demonstrating how ancient Egypt was more than a mere setting for Orientalist fantasies or nightmares, the book establishes how conceptions of modernity were inextricably bound up in the contemporary reception of the ancient world, and suggests how such ideas that took root and flourished in the Victorian era persist to this day.
Download or read book Victorian Contingencies written by Tina Young Choi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture—by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and upended forgone conclusions. Victorian Contingencies shows how scientists, novelists, and consumers engaged in new formal and material experiments with cause and effect, past and present, that actively undermined routine certainties. Tina Young Choi traces contingency across a wide range of materials and media, from newspaper advertisements and children's stories to well-known novels, scientific discoveries, technological innovations. She shows how Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin reinvented geological and natural histories as spaces for temporal and causal experimentation, while the nascent insurance industry influenced Charles Babbage's computational designs for a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. Choi pairs novelists George Eliot and Lewis Carroll with physicist James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrating how they introduced possibility and probability into once-assured literary and scientific narratives. And she explores the popular board games and pre-cinematic visual entertainments that encouraged Victorians to navigate a world made newly uncertain. By locating contingency within these cultural contexts, this book invites a deep and multidisciplinary reassessment of the longer histories of causality, closure, and chance.
Download or read book Troy Carthage and the Victorians written by Rachel Bryant Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.
Download or read book Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable written by Sarah C Alexander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.
Download or read book Victorian Structures written by Jody Griffith and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels’ self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself. Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention, we find these buildings offer more than evocative background settings. Victorian Structures uses the architectural writings of Victorian critic John Ruskin as a framework for examining the interaction of physical, social, and narrative structures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. By closely reading their descriptions of architectural structure, this book reconsiders structure itself—both the social structures the novels reflect, and the narrative structures they employ. Weaving together analysis of these three kinds of structure offers an interpretation of Victorian realism that is far more socially and formally unstable than critics have tended to assume. It illustrates how these novels radically critique the limitations, dysfunctions, and deceptions of structure, while also imagining alternative possibilities. This unique interdisciplinary approach emphasizes structure-in-time: while current conversations about structure focus on its static and fixed properties, this book understands it as various forces in tension, producing meanings that are always in flux. Victorian Structures focuses not only on the way structures shape our perceptions and experiences, but also, more importantly, on the processes through which those structures come to be constructed in the first place, and how they change over time. “For Jody Griffith, ‘form’ is not merely a controversial topic for twenty-first-century literary critics: it’s also the architectural form of John Ruskin, living and changing over time. Her book blends contemporary methods with nineteenth-century ideas to arrive at original formalist readings of the Victorian novel.” — Rachel Teukolsky, Vanderbilt University
Download or read book Realism and Space in the Novel 1795 1869 written by Rosa Mucignat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posing new questions about realism and the creative power of narratives, Rosa Mucignat takes a fresh look at the relationship between representation and reality. As Mucignat points out, worlds evoked in fiction all depend to a greater or lesser extent on the world we know from experience, but they are neither parasites on nor copies of those realms. Never fully aligned with the real world, stories grow out of the mismatch between reality and representation-those areas of the fictional space that are not located on actual maps, but still form a fully structured imagined geography. Mucignat offers new readings of six foundational texts of modern Western culture: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, Stendahl'ss The Red and the Black, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Using these texts as source material and supporting evidence for a new and comprehensive theory of space in fiction, she examines the links between the nineteenth-century novel's interest in creating substantial, life-like worlds and contemporary developments in science, art, and society. Mucignat's book is an evocative analysis of the way novels marshal their technical and stylistic resources to produce imagined geographies so complex and engrossing that they intensify and even transform the reader's experience of real-life places.
Download or read book Science Medicine and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction written by Abigail Boucher and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, Medicine, and Lineage in Popular Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watched for signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.
Download or read book Victorian Gothic written by Andrew Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first multi-disciplinary scholarly consideration of the Victorian Gothic These 14 chapters, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, provide an invaluable insight into the complex and various Gothic forms of the nineteenth century. Covering a range of diverse contexts, the chapters focus on science, medicine, Queer theory, imperialism, nationalism, and gender. Together with further chapters on the ghost story, realism, the fin de sic e, pulp fictions, sensation fiction, and the Victorian way of death, the Companion provides the most complete overview of the Victorian Gothic to date.The book is an essential resource for students and scholars working on the Gothic, Victorian literature and culture, and critical theory.Key Features*First multi-authored thorough exploration of the Victorian Gothic*Original research in all chapters*Sets the agenda for future scholarship in the field*Pedagogically awareKey WordsVictorian, Gothic, Science, Gender, Nationalism, Death, Supernatural, Ghost, Death
Download or read book The Victorian World written by Martin Hewitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century. This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on ‘Varieties of Victorianism’ offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years. Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature written by Dennis Denisoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.
Download or read book The Lyric in Victorian Memory written by Veronica Alfano and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of nineteenth-century poems that remember, yearn for, fixate on, and forget the past. Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits – such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition – that appear in the lyrics examined. This book considers the interwoven nature of remembering and forgetting in the work of four Victorian poets. It uses this theme to shed new light on the relationship between lyric and narrative, on the connections between gender and genre, and on the way in which Victorians represented and commemorated the past.
Download or read book Darwin Tennyson and Their Readers written by Valerie Purton and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science’ is an edited collection of essays from leading authorities in the field of Victorian literature and science, including Gillian Beer and George Levine. Darwin, Tennyson, Huxley, Ruskin, Richard Owen, Meredith, Wilde and other major writers are discussed, as established scholars in this area explore the interaction between Victorian literary and scientific figures which helped build the intellectual climate of twenty-first century debates.
Download or read book Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction written by Anna Neill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Victorian anthropology made two apparently contradictory claims: it distinguished "civilized man" from animals and "primitive" humans and it linked them though descent. Paradoxically, it was by placing human history in a deep past shaped by minute, incremental changes (rather than at the apex of Providential order) that evolutionary anthropology could assert a new form of human exceptionalism and define civilized humanity against both human and nonhuman savagery. This book shows how fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions—utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children’s fables—untether human and nonhuman animal agency from this increasingly orthodox account of the deep past. As they imagine worlds that lift the evolutionary constraints on development and as they collapse evolution into lived time, these stories reveal (and even occupy) dynamic landscapes of cognitive descent that contest prevailing anthropological ideas about race, culture, and species difference.
Download or read book Essays on James Clarence Mangan written by S. Sturgeon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection of essays to focus on the extraordinary literary achievement of James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), increasingly recognized as one of the most important Irish writers of the nineteenth century. It features contributions by acclaimed contemporary writers including Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson.
