Download or read book Life Writing and Victorian Culture written by David Amigoni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, experts from Britain and the United States in the fields of nineteenth-century literature, and social and cultural history explore new directions in the field of Victorian life writing. Chapters examine a varied yet interrelated range of genres, from the biography and autobiography, to the relatively neglected diary, collective biography, and obituary. Reflecting the rich research being conducted in this area, the contributors link life writing to the formation of gendered and class-based identities; the politics of the Victorian family; and the broader professional, political, colonial, and literary structures in which social and kinship relations were implicated. A wide variety of Victorian works are considered, from the diary of the Radical Samuel Bamford, to the diary of the homosexual George Ives; from autobiographies of professional men to collective biographies of eminent women. Embracing figures as diverse as Gandhi, Wilde, and Bradlaugh, the collection explores the way in which narratives contested one another in a society that devoted an abundance of cultural energy to writing about, and reading of, lives.
Download or read book A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture written by Herbert F. Tucker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Sabine Schülting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.
Download or read book This Victorian Life written by Sarah A. Chrisman and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Traditions of Victorian Women s Autobiography written by Linda H. Peterson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian women's autobiography emerged at a historical moment when the field of life writing was particularly rich. Spiritual autobiography was developing interesting variations in the heroic memoirs of pioneering missionary women and in probing intellectual analyses of Nonconformists, Anglicans, agnostics, and other religious thinkers. The chroniques scandaleuses of the eighteenth century were giving way to the respectable artist's life of the professional Victorian woman. The domestic memoir, a Victorian variation on the family histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flourished in a culture that celebrated the joys of home, family, and private life. Perhaps most important, Victorian women writers were experimenting with all these forms in various combinations and permutations. Arguing that women's autobiography does not represent a singular separate tradition but instead embraces multiple lineages, Linda H. Peterson explores the poetics and politics of these diverse forms of life writing. She carefully analyzes the polemical Autobiography of Harriet Martineau and Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, the missionary memoirs that challenge Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Romantic autobiographies of the poet and poetess that Barrett Browning reconstructs in Aurora Leigh, the professional life stories of Margaret Oliphant and her contemporaries, and the Brontëan and Eliotian bifurcations of Mary Cholmondeley's memoirs. The desire to know the details of other women's lives--and to use them for one's own purposes--underlies much Victorian women's autobiography, even as it helps to explain our continuing interest in their accounts.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (on 'Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology', 'Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief', and 'Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures', the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and established scholars.
Download or read book Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence written by Laura E. Franey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-10-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers' descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.
Download or read book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Download or read book Masculinity and the English Working Class written by Ying Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes. The book also maps the relationship between two trends: the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies (in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership); and a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors. The book mimics this point of convergence by pairing three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). Ying considers the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. Then mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley are re-read from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points.
Download or read book Victorian Secrets written by Sarah A. Chrisman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Sarah A. Chrisman’s twenty-ninth birthday, her husband, Gabriel, presented her with a corset. The material and the design were breathtakingly beautiful, but her mind immediately filled with unwelcome views. Although she had been in love with the Victorian era all her life, she had specifically asked her husband not to buy her a corset—ever. She’d heard how corsets affected the female body and what they represented, and she wanted none of it. However, Chrisman agreed to try on the garment . . . and found it surprisingly enjoyable. The corset, she realized, was a tool of empowerment—not oppression. After a year of wearing a corset on a daily basis, her waist had gone from thirty-two inches to twenty-two inches, she was experiencing fewer migraines, and her posture improved. She had successfully transformed her body, her dress, and her lifestyle into that of a Victorian woman—and everyone was asking about it. In Victorian Secrets, Chrisman explains how a garment from the past led to a change in not only the way she viewed herself, but also the ways she understood the major differences between the cultures of twenty-first-century and nineteenth-century America. The desire to delve further into the Victorian lifestyle provided Chrisman with new insight into issues of body image and how women, past and present, have seen and continue to see themselves.
Download or read book A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture written by Herbert F. Tucker and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1999-02-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty leading Victorianists from around the world collaborate here in a multidimensional analysis of the breadth and sweep of modern Britain's longest, unruliest literary epoch.
Download or read book Victorian America written by Thomas J. Schlereth and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1992-07-15 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A valuable and compelling portrait of the daily life of Americans during the Victorian era--the fourth volume in the Everyday Life in America series
Download or read book Essays on Life Writing written by Marlene Kadar and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars.
Download or read book Victorian Biography written by David Amigoni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks Victorian biography and some of its major practitioners from the perspectives of Bakhtinian and Foucauldian discourse theory. A re-reading of the writings of Thomas Carlyle, particularly "Sartor Resartus" and Oliver Cromwell's "Letters and Speeches", provides the basis for the central argument of the book: that the biographical writings of late-19th-century figures such as John Morley, Frederick Harrison, Leslie Stephen, and J.R. Seeley need to be seen as an argument against Carlyle's writing practices, and as an attempt to impose cultural discipline on reading practices. The book contends that biography is a key genre for understanding debates between 19th-century intellectuals about the circulation and use of "literary" and "historical" discourse. As such, it is also a timely intervention in the current debate about the emergence of the disciplines of "literature" and "history" in the 19th century.
Download or read book Life Writing and the Nineteenth Century Market written by Sean Grass and published by . This book was released on 2024-11-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [headline]Articulates life writing's complex engagement with the nineteenth-century literary market Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of 'genre', or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration - to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England. [bio]Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specialises in Victorian literature and culture, the book market, the Victorian novel, life writing and the works of Charles Dickens. He has published three monographs: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (2019); Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (2014); and The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2004).
Download or read book Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Deborah Lutz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.
Download or read book A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture written by Herbert F. Tucker and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1999-10-29 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty leading Victorianists from around the world collaborate here in a multidimensional analysis of the breadth and sweep of modern Britain's longest, unruliest literary epoch.
