Download or read book Secret Victorians written by Melissa E. Feldman and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work by contemporary artists from the U.S. and the U.K. that evokes a Victorian sensibility. The essays look at parallels between the two periods: turn-of-the-century anxiety, intellectual curiosity, consumerism, a preoccupation with sex and morality, an infatuation with new technology.
Download or read book Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America written by Mark Christopher Carnes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of American 19th-century secret orders, the author argues that religious practices and gender roles became increasingly feminized in Victorian America and that secret societies, such as the Freemasons, offered men and boys an alternative, male counterculture.
Download or read book Victorian Sensation written by James A. Secord and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09-20 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Secret Selves written by Oliver S. Buckton and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the representation of same-sex desire in Victorian autobiographical writing, Oliver Buckton offers significant new readings of works by such influential 19th-century writers as Edward Carpenter, John Henry Newman, John Addington Symonds, and, in an epilogue, E.M. Forster, and reveals the "confessional" elements of their writings.
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 Family Secrets written by Deborah Cohen and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why. In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit and cap. In a town in the Cotswolds, a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions: hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle. In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home.
Download or read book Strange and Secret Peoples written by Carole G. Silver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.
Download or read book Queen Victoria s Secrets written by Adrienne Munich and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.
Download or read book Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection written by Michael Cox and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Fergus Hume, Arthur Morrison, M.P. Shiel, Baroness Orczy, Sax Rohmer, Robert Barr, and - inevitably - Arthur Conan Doyle. There are police detectives, gentleman amateurs, lady detectives (such as Catherine Pirkis's Loveday Brooke), professional consulting detectives, even an 'anti-detective' (Guy Boothby's Klimo, who devises a crime for himself to solve), and a psychic detective. The villains against whom they pit their wits are equally various, as are their crimes - from fraud and forgery to theft, abduction, and of course murder most foul, whether by poison, bullet, or blade. These stories offer hours of enjoyable escape for all lovers of crime fiction.
Download or read book The Efficient Secret written by Gary W. Cox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rational choice model analyses the problems of voter choice, the emergence of partly loyalty and cabinet government in Victorian England.
Download or read book The Secret Staircase written by Sheila Connolly and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Sheila Connolly, The Secret Staircase is the third Victorian Village Mystery, which finds Kate Hamilton discovering a long-dead body in a hidden staircase. Kate Hamilton is feeling good about her plans to recreate Asheboro, Maryland as the Victorian village it once was. The town is finally on her side, and the finances are coming together. Kate's first goal is to renovate the Barton Mansion on the outskirts of town. Luckily, it's been well maintained in the century since the wealthy Henry Barton lived and died there. The only substantial change she's planning is to update the original kitchen so that it can be used to cater events in the building. But when the contractor gets started, he discovers a hidden staircase that had been walled in years earlier. And as Kate's luck would have it, in the stairwell is a body. After her initial shock wears off, Kate is relieved when the autopsy reveals that the man had died around 1880. Unfortunately, it also reveals that his was not a natural death—he was murdered. And serious questions remain: who was he and what was he doing there? Kate begins a hunt to identify the man and figure out what he was doing at the Barton Mansion. But when a second body is found—this time from the present day—Kate realizes that real dangers lie in digging up the past...
Download or read book The Hangman s Secret written by Laura Joh Rowland and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intrepid photographer Sarah Bain and her motley crew of detectives are back to hunt criminals in the seedy underbelly of Victorian London—but little do they know, the darkness may lurk closer than they first divined Photographer Sarah Bain and her friends, Lord Hugh Staunton and sometime street urchin Mick O’Reilly, are private detectives with a new gig—photographing crime scenes for London’s Daily World newspaper. The Daily World is the latest business venture of their sole client, Sir Gerald Mariner, a fabulously wealthy and powerful banker. One cold, snowy January morning, Sarah, Hugh and Mick are summoned to the goriest crime scene they’ve ever encountered. A pub owner named Harry Warbrick has been found hanged and decapitated amid evidence of foul play. His murder becomes a sensation for being England’s top hangman but was met with the same fate that he inflicted on hundreds of criminals. Sir Gerald announces that the Daily World—meaning Sarah and her friends—will investigate and solve Harry Warbrick’s murder before the police do. The contest pits Sarah against the man she loves, Police Constable Barrett. She and her friends discover a connection between Harry Warbrick’s murder and the most notorious criminal he ever executed—Amelia Carlisle, the “Baby-Butcher,” who murdered hundreds of infants placed in her care. Something happened at Amelia’s execution. The Official Secrets Act forbids the seven witnesses present to divulge any information about it. But Harry had a bad habit of leaking tips to the press. Sarah and her friends suspect that one of the other witnesses killed Harry to prevent him from revealing a secret related to the execution. What is the secret, and who hanged the hangman? From award-winning author Laura Joh Rowland, The Hangman’s Secret builds suspense about the darkness that lurks within and the deadly secrets that beg to be revealed.
Download or read book Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction written by Jerome Meckier and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Download or read book Reimag in ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art written by Isobel Elstob and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From contemporary deployments of taxidermy, magic lanterns and microscopy to the visualization of forgotten lives, marginalized narratives and colonial histories, this book explores how the work of artists including Mat Collishaw, Yinka Shonibare, Tessa Farmer, Mark Dion, Dorothy Cross and Ingrid Pollard reimag(in)es the Victorians in the ‘present’. Examining how recent paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and films revisit and re-present nineteenth-century technologies, practices and events, the book’s rich interdisciplinary approach applies literary, media and linguistic theories to its analysis of visual art, alongside in-depth discussions of the Victorian inventions, concepts and narratives that they invoke. The book’s emphasis on how – and why – we represent the historical past makes its contribution particularly timely. And by drawing attention to the importance of historiography to the work of these artists, it also unravels the complicated history of History itself. This book will speak to diverse audiences including those interested in art history, visual culture, Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, as well as literature, histories of science and media, postcolonialism, museology, gender studies, postmodernism and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Epistolary Encounters in Neo Victorian Fiction written by K. Brindle and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neo-Victorian writers invoke conflicting viewpoints in diaries, letters, etc. to creatively retrace the past in fragmentary and contradictory ways. This book explores the complex desires involved in epistolary discoveries of 'hidden' Victorians, offering new insight into the creative synthesising of critical thought within the neo-Victorian novel.
Download or read book The Victorians written by David Gange and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian era was a time of unprecedented transformation, yet it is often understood only through the stereotypes of crowded factories, child labour and emotional repression. In this entertaining and scholarly introduction, Dr David Gange explores the political, social and economic realities that defined life for Victorian people. Weaving together the perspectives of historians and literary scholars with movements in art, science and ethics, Gange paints a colourful, interdisciplinary portrait of everyday life in nineteenth century Britain. The Victorians: A Beginner's Guide features such famous figures as Dickens and Disraeli, while offering a thought-provoking examination of how our perceptions of this pivotal period of history have changed.
Download or read book The Other Victorians written by Steven Marcus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as his point of departure the authors, the audience, and the texts of Victorian writings on sex in general and of Victorian pornography in particular, Steven Marcus offers a startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian culture. The subjects dealt with in The Other Victorians are not only those to have been "shocking" in the Victorian period. The way these subjects were regarded--and the way our notions of the Victorians continue to change, as the efforts of contemporary scholarship restore them to their full historical dimensions--are matters today of some surprise and wonder. Making use, for the first time, of the extensive collection of Victoriana at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Marcus first examines the writings of Dr. William Acton, who may be said to represent the "official views" of sexuality held by Victorian society, and of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the first and most important bibliographer-scholar of pornography. He then turns to the most significant work of its kind from the period, the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life. There follows an analysis of four pornographic Victorian novels--an analysis that throws an oblique but fascinating light on the classics of Victorian literature--and a review of the odd flood of Victorian publications devoted to flagellation. The book concludes with a chapter propounding a general theory of pornography as a sociological phenomenon. With the publication of The Other Victorians, understanding of this period took a giant stride forward. Most of the writers and writings discussed by Marcus belong to Victorian sub-literature rather than to literature proper; in this way the work remains connected to a consideration of the exotic sub-literature. A brilliantly written book in its own right, this work transformed the study of the Victorian period as did no other.
