Download or read book The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction written by Peter Keating and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1971. The book examines the presentation of the urban and industrial working classes in Victorian fiction. It considers the different types of working men and women who appear in fiction, the environments they are shown to inhabit, and the use of phonetics to indicate the sound of working class voices. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of major and minor fiction, and new light is cast on Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Morrison. This book would be of interest to students of literature, sociology and history.
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 265 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 Memoirs of Victorian Working Class Women written by Florence s. Boos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.
Download or read book Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England written by Rachel Worth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.
Download or read book From Spinster to Career Woman written by Arlene Young and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.
Download or read book Feeling for the Poor written by Carolyn Betensky and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.
Download or read book Working Fictions written by Carolyn Lesjak and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.
Download or read book Class Fictions written by Pamela Fox and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 1994-11-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.
Download or read book Youth of Darkest England written by Troy Boone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the representation of English working-class children — the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England" — in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, Boone focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist working-class children into the British imperial enterprise, demonstrating convincingly that the British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.
Download or read book Victorian Publishing written by Alexis Weedon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.
Download or read book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes written by Jonathan Rose and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience.
Download or read book Class in Turn of the Century Novels of Gissing James Hardy and Wells written by Christine DeVine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2005, this book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades through the disruption of traditional novelistic conventions. With reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork, photography and specific historical events, this book contextualizes novels by these writers within their historical moment. In doing so, it illuminates the relationship between fiction and history in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century fiction. This book will be of interest to those studying late nineteenth-century literature and history.
Download or read book Culture Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel written by Arlene Young and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-09-11 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interrelation of social class and its literary representation in Victorian Britain, focusing for the first time on the emergence of the lower middle class as a social and cultural phenomenon. It places the evolution of the lower middle class and its relation to other classes within the social structure of nineteenth-century England and within the historical context of changing perceptions of the idea of the gentlemen and the changing role of women, especially during the second half of the century. Arlene Young traces popular attitudes towards various representative class and cultural types through the examination of novels, comic sketches, and contemporary nineteenth-century social commentaries.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel written by Deirdre David and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.
Download or read book The Working Class in American Literature written by John F. Lavelle and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary texts are artifacts of their time and ideologies. This book collection explores the working class in American literature from the colonial to the contemporary period through a critical lens which addresses the real problems of approaching class through economics. Significantly, this book moves the analysis of working-class literature away from the Marxist focus on the relationship between class and the means of production and applies an innovative concept of class based on the sociological studies of humans and society first championed by Max Weber. Of primary concern is the construction of class separation through the concept of in-grouping/out grouping. This book builds upon the theories established in John F. Lavelle's Blue Collar, Theoretically: A Post-Marxist Approach to Working Class Literature (McFarland, 2011) and puts them into practice by examining a diverse set of texts that reveal the complexity of class relations in American society.
Download or read book Home in British Working Class Fiction written by Dr Nicola Wilson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. Examining key works by Robert Tressell, Alan Sillitoe, D. H. Lawrence, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, Jeanette Winterson and James Kelman, among many others, Nicola Wilson demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.
Download or read book The Victorian Novel and Masculinity written by P. Mallett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.
