Download or read book Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Paul Raphael Rooney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Victorian readers’ consumption of a wide array of reading matter. Established scholars and emerging researchers examine nineteenth-century audience encounters with print culture material such as periodicals, books in series, cheap serials, and broadside ballads. Two key strands of enquiry run through the volume. First, these studies of historical readership during the Victorian period look to recover the motivations or desired returns that underpinned these audiences’ engagement with this reading matter. Second, contributors investigate how nineteenth-century reading and consumption of print was framed and/or shaped by contemporaneous engagement with content disseminated in other media like advertising, the stage, exhibitions, and oral culture.

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 2013-10-27 with total page 360 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 Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction written by Kevin A. Morrison and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.

Download or read book Singing the News of Death written by Una McIlvenna and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.

Download or read book Lecturing the Victorians written by Anne B. Rodrick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular lecture for purposes ranging from serious education to effervescent entertainment and from regional pride to imperial belonging. Over time, the popular lecture became the quintessential embodiment of Victorian knowledge-based culture, which itself ranged from the production of new knowledge in the most elite of learned societies to the consumption of established knowledge in middle-class clubs and the hundreds of humble mechanics' institutions initially founded to provide scientific instruction to workers. What did the “average” Victorian talk and think about? How did the knowledge-based culture of lecture and debate enable men and women to demonstrate both civic engagement and cultural competence? How does this knowledge-based culture and its changing expression give us ways to look at Victorian citizenship long before the extension of the franchise? With engaging and accessible prose Anne Rodrick draws from a variety of primary sources to provide fascinating answers to these pertinent questions. Based on the analysis of several thousand lectures and debates delivered over more than 50 years, this book digs deeply into what those individuals below the most elite levels thought, heard, debated, and claimed as a badge of cultural competence. By the turn of the 20th century, the popular lecture was competing for attention with new institutions of leisure and of higher education, and the discourse surrounding its place in contemporary England helps illuminate important debates over access to and deployment of knowledge and culture.

Download or read book Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press Volume 2 written by Finkelstein David Finkelstein and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800-1900Provides a comprehensive history of the British and Irish Press from 1800-1900, reflected upon in 60 substantive chapters and focused case studiesSets out to capture the cross-regional and transnational dimension of press history in nineteenth-century Britain and IrelandOffers unique and important reassessments of nineteenth-century British and Irish press and periodical media within social, cultural, technological, economic and historical contextsThis is a unique collection of essays examining nineteenth-century British and Irish newspaper and periodical history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on cross-border and transnational comparisons and contrasts in nineteenth-century print communication. Designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, in addition to an extensive introduction, it includes forty newly commissioned chapters and case studies exploring a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. Along with keystone chapters on the economics of the press and periodicals, production processes, readership and distribution networks, and legal frameworks under which the press operated, the book examines a wide range of areas from religious, literary, political and medical press genres to analyses of overseas and migr press and emerging developments in children's and women's press.

Download or read book Black Students in Imperial Britain written by Robert Burroughs and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism of the late-nineteenth-century civilising mission, the students were not simply the objects of British charity. They were also agents in a culture of evangelical humanitarianism. Some were fully absorbed in the civilising mission, becoming leading missionaries. Others adapted their experiences to new ends, participating in networks of pan-Africanism that questioned race prejudice and colonialism. In their negotiations of the challenges and opportunities at the heart of the empire, the students of Congo House reveal how the global currents of black history shaped the localised cultures of Victorian philanthropy. From racism to pan-Africanism, this study sheds new light on key issues in black British history.

Download or read book Victorian Epic Burlesques written by Rachel Bryant Davies and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents annotated scripts of four major burlesques by key playwrights: Melodrama Mad! or, the Siege of Troy by Thomas John Dibdin (1819); Telemachus; or, the Island of Calypso by J.R. Planché (1834); The Iliad; or, the Siege of Troy by Robert Brough (1858) and Ulysses; or the Ironclad Warriors and the Little Tug of War by F.C. Burnand (1865). Beloved legend, archaeological riddle and educational staple: Homer's epic tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath were vividly reimagined in nineteenth-century Britain. Classical burlesques-exceptionally successful theatrical entertainments-continually mined the Iliad and Odyssey to lucrative comic effect. Burlesques combined song, dance and slapstick comedy with an eclectic kaleidoscope of topical allusions. From namedropping boxing legends to recasting Shakespearean combats, epic adaptations overflow with satirical commentary on politics, cultural highlights and everyday current affairs. In uncovering Homer's irreverently playful afterlife, this selection showcases burlesque's development and wide appeal. The critical introduction analyses how these plays contested the accessibility of classical antiquity and dramatic performance. Textual and literary annotations, with contemporary illustrations, illuminate the juxtaposed sources to establish these repackaged epics as indispensable tools for unlocking nineteenth-century social, cultural and political history. Resources for further study are available online.

Download or read book Working Verse in Victorian Scotland written by Kirstie Blair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed. During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.

Download or read book Britain s Black Past written by Gretchen H. Gerzina and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanding upon the 2017 Radio 4 series ‘Britain’s Black Past’, this book presents those stories and analyses through the lens of a recovered past. Even those who may be familiar with some of the materials will find much that they had not previously known, and will be introduced to people, places, and stories brought to light by new research. In a time of international racial unrest and migration, it is important not to lose sight of similar situations that took place in an earlier time. In chapters written by scholars, artists, and independent researchers, readers will learn of an early musician, the sales of slaves in Scotland, the grave—now a shrine—of a black enslaved boy left to die in Morecombe Bay, of a country estate owned by a mixed-race slave owner, and of the two strikingly different people who lived in a Bristol house that is now a museum. Black sailors, political activists, memoirists, appear in these pages, but the book also re-examines living history, in the form of modern plays, television programmes, and genealogical sleuthing. Through them, Britain’s Black Past is not only presented anew, but shown to be very much alive in our own time.

Download or read book Railway Reading and Late Victorian Literary Series written by Paul Raphael Rooney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The railway was one of the principal Victorian spaces of reading. This book spotlights one of the leading audience demographics in this late-Victorian market: the newly empowered readers of the expanding middle class. The transactions in which late-Victorian readers acquired the books read whilst travelling are reconstructed by exploring the leading determinants of consumers’ purchasing choices at the railway station bookstalls selling books intended for reading in this zone. This exploration concentrates on the impact of forces like the input of the staff running the bookstalls and the commercial environment in which consumers made their purchases. At the center of this study is a leading (and still relatively under-examined) genre of Victorian print culture circulating in this reading space― the series. Rooney examines three leading examples of late-Victorian series, which sought to satisfy railway passengers’ need for literary reading matter. Many of the period’s principal authors and literary genres featured in their lists. Each venture is representative of one of the three main pricing tiers of series publishing. Employing an eclectic methodological framework combining cultural studies and book history approaches with concepts from the new humanities, the reading experiences furnished by the light fiction of these series are reconstructed. This study reflects the recent growth in scholarship on historical readership, the expansion in the canon of Victorian popular literature, and the broader material turn in nineteenth-century studies.

Download or read book Edinburgh History of Reading written by Rose Jonathan Rose and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesShows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and ChinaExplores how digital media has transformed literary criticismPortrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural linesCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

Download or read book Sensation Drama 1860 1880 written by Hofer-Robinson Joanna Hofer-Robinson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features previously unpublished material alongside famous plays This pioneering edition provides access to some of the most popular plays of the nineteenth century. Characterised by exhilarating plots, large-scale special effects and often transgressive characterisation, these dramas are still exciting for modern readers. This anthology lays the foundation for further scholarly work on sensation drama and focuses public attention on to this influential and immensely popular genre. It features five plays from writers including Dion Boucicault and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These are supported by a substantial critical apparatus, which adds further value to the anthology by providing rich details on performance history and textual variants. The critical introduction situates the genre in its cultural context and argues for the significance of sensation drama to shifting theatrical cultures and practices.Key FeaturesProvides detailed critical apparatus to facilitate the study of neglected plays, including performance history, notes and recommended further readingWidens the critical conversation on sensation drama by drawing attention to the work of female playwrightsReprints obscure works by popular authors and shows their involvement with both literary and theatrical cultures

Download or read book Down from London written by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period’s complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading’ as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.

Download or read book G W M Reynolds Reimagined written by Jennifer Conary and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-21 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection proposes that G.W.M. Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian print culture reveals the interrelations between authorship, genre, and radicalism in popular print culture of the nineteenth century. As a best-selling author of popular fiction marketed to the lower classes, and a passionate champion of radical politics and "the industrious classes," Reynolds and his work demonstrate the relevance of Victorian Studies to topics of pressing contemporary concern including populism, working-class fiction, the concept of ‘originality’, and the collective scholarly endeavour to ‘widen’ and ‘undiscipline’ Victorian Studies. Bringing together well-known and newly-emerging scholars from across different disciplinary perspectives, the volume explores the importance of Reynolds Studies to scholarship on the nineteenth-century. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century press, popular culture, and of authorship, as well as to Victorian Studies scholars interested in the translation of Victorian texts into new and indigenous markets.

Download or read book Material Ambitions written by Rebecca Richardson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the Victorian history of self-help reveals about the myth of individualism. Stories of hardworking characters who lift themselves from rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. From the popularity of such stories, it is clear that the Victorians valorized personal ambition in ways that previous generations had not. In Material Ambitions, Rebecca Richardson explores this phenomenon in light of the under-studied reception history of Samuel Smiles's 1859 publication, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. A compilation of vignettes about captains of industry, artists, and inventors who persevered through failure and worked tirelessly to achieve success in their respective fields, Self-Help links individual ambition to the growth of the nation. Contextualizing Smiles's work in a tradition of Renaissance self-fashioning, eighteenth-century advice books, and inspirational biography, Richardson argues that the burgeoning self-help genre of the Victorian era offered a narrative structure that linked individual success with collective success in a one-to-one relationship. Advocating for a broader cultural account of the ambitious hero narrative, Richardson argues that reading these biographies and self-help texts alongside fictional accounts of driven people complicates the morality tale that writers like Smiles took pains to invoke. In chapters featuring the works of Harriet Martineau, Dinah Craik, Thackeray, Trollope, and Miles Franklin, Richardson demonstrates that Victorian fiction dramatized ambition by suggesting where it runs up against the limits of an individual's energy and ability, where it turns into competition, or where it risks upsetting a socio-ecological system of finite resources. The upward mobility plots of John Halifax, Gentleman or Vanity Fair suggest the dangers of zero-sum thinking, particularly evidenced by contemporary preoccupations with Malthusian and Darwinian discourses. Intertwining the methodologies of disability studies and ecocriticism, Material Ambitions persuasively unmasks the longstanding myth that ambitious individualism can overcome disadvantageous systematic and structural conditions.

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 753 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.