'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.
In an age of radical transformation, the Victorians were caught between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. In the face of such a dizzying present, connecting with their past became for the Victorians a kind of survival strategy - this nostalgia took forms as diverse as their obsession with history and origins; the religious revivalism of the Oxford Movement; and the new Houses of Parliament, built in 1834, whose design looked longingly back to the Middle Ages.This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire. This beautifully written meditation provides a vivid, compelling and authoritative portrait of an era that, in the face of an exhilarating and menacing present, longingly embraced the stability and comfort of a past both real and imagined.
'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.
There have been a great many books written on military intelligence and the secret services rooted in the twentieth century; however there is very little covering the activities of the men involved in the establishment of this fascinating institution. Its origins lie in the British Army: from the beginnings in the Topographical Department to the Boer War, when various factors made the foundation work of the eventual MI5 (founded in 1909) possible. Incredibly, there were two vast armies in the 1840s, both serving the state and Queen, yet no formally organized military intelligence bureau. Such ignorance of the enemy brought about many botched and bloody encounters, such as the notorious Charge of the Light Brigade. The thrilling story of the various intelligence sources for the armed forces throughout the Victorian period is one of individuals, adventurers and small, ad hoc bodies set up by commanders when the need arose. Stephen Wades enthralling book reveals the unsteady foundations of one of the countrys most prominent and renowned organizations, tracing the various elements that gradually composed the intelligence and political branches of Britains Secret Service.
This Dictionary is a guide to the literary terms most relevant to students and readers of English literature today, thorough on the essentials and generous in its intellectual scope. The definitions are lively and precise in equipping students and general readers with a genuinely useful critical vocabulary. It identifies the thinking and controversies surrounding terms, and offers fresh insights and directions for future reading. It does this with the help of extensive cross-referencing, indexes and up-to-date bibliography (with recommended websites).
'Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction' explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860-1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of violence, either in big-game hunting or in the collection of scientific specimens, and draw on a range of literary sources, most notably romance, natural history writing and 'penny dreadful' fiction.This study investigates how these texts' depictions of forms of violence complicate the seemingly fundamental distinction of humans from animals, and undermines the ideological structures of imperial rule. Rather than an innate and hierarchical opposition, the relationship of humans with their animal others emerges in this context as a complex interplay of kinship and difference. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire's logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focused criticism. Most vitally, it also signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, environmental activism and global social justice.
"e;Jane Austen's Families"e; discusses the fictional families - such as the Bennets and the Bertrams - whose dynamics are crucial both to Austen's plots and to her explorations of ethical complexities. The study focuses upon the central characters' interactions with their own families and (to a lesser extent) with other family groups in an exploration of how emotional and moral development is both hindered and fostered by these interactions. Significantly, Austen chooses not to write about the orphaned heroines so often preferred by novelists of the period; rather, for a writer who cares intensely for what is natural and probable in fiction, the most common early experience of surviving the pains and pleasures of family life provides the richest material for her work. This study is historically grounded, reading Austen in the context of contemporary writing and visual culture in an exploration of her treatment of the relations between parent and child. It examines Austen's heroines as their parents' daughters, responding to and resisting their upbringing, and shows how family interactions shape their courtships. Inevitably this concern involves a consideration both of the ethics of parenthood and of the ethics these heroines acquire from their parents, through adaptation, imitation and resistance to what they are taught, directly and indirectly. Interactions between parent and child affect both the daughter's experience and her active moral life.
Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said's Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested '[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists.' By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences. The subject range of this volume of essays on late Victorian Orientalism explores nineteenth-century modes of art which position themselves as instruments of knowledge of the Orient. The contributors deploy variegated tools derived from textual studies and visual culture research in order to explore the many ways in which the late Victorians envisioned the East. It is this combined approach which makes possible the reconsideration of Orientalist literature, art and cinema.
Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States.
This major new work, based on significant new material on Ruskin¿s Guild of St George, offers the first authoritative work on this important venture in Ruskin¿s late career in social, cultural, and environmental action.
This anthology is the first collection of primary science articles written by scientists working in America during the nineteenth century.
'Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science' is an edited collection of essays by Gillian Beer, George Levine and other leading scholars, exploring the interaction between literature and science in the works of Darwin, Tennyson, Huxley and other major figures of the Victorian age.
Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, 'Mapping the Nation' offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870?1920.
¿Stephen Wall, ¿Trollope and Character¿ (1988) and Other Essays on Victorian Literature¿ is a collection of critical essays by the eminent literary critic Stephen Wall, including his exceptional writings on Anthony Trollope, as well as brilliant studies of Charles Dickens and other major Victorian figures.
John Ruskin, whose bicentenary will be celebrated world-wide in 2019, was not only an art historian, cultural critic and political theorist but, above all, a great educator. He was the inspiration behind such influential figures as William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi and his influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere of education today, for example, in debates about the importance of creativity, about grammar schools and social mobility, about Further Education, the crucial social role of libraries, environmental issues, the role of crafts as well as academic learning, the importance of fantasy literature, and the education of women. The current collection brings together ten top international Ruskin scholars to explore what he actually said about education in his many-faceted writings, and points to some of the key educational issues raised by his work. [NP] The volume is divided into three sections, covering the three major areas of Ruskin's concerns, namely social reform, the arts and religion. Their titles suggest his dynamic effect in all three areas: A) Changing Society; B) Libraries and the Arts; C) Christianity and Apocalypse. Ruskin's vision of education as both dividually and socially transformative is explored by Sara Atwood in Chapter 1. Among much else, he stresses the value of simplicity, one of many ideas he shared with his great admirer, Leo Tolstoy, a relationship explored by Stuart Eagles in Chapter 2. Ruskin believes too in the social and educational importance of dress, an idea developed by Rachel Dickinson in Chapter 3. Jan Marsh, in Chapter 4, examines Ruskin's contradictory stance on female education. Though he was a great believer in the 'separate spheres', he also championed wider learning opportunities for girls. The dissemination of education, through libraries and through the arts, is one of Ruskin's abiding concerns. Continuing his argument about the power of simplicity over artifice, he talks in the inaugural address of 'the virtues of Christianity [being] best practised, and its doctrines best attested, by a handful of mountain shepherds without art, without literature, almost without language.' In the history of Switzerland, he says, 'The shepherd's staff prevailed over the soldier's spear.' In Chapter 5 Emma Sdegno explores Ruskin's Shepherds' Library, his notion of book dissemination to such people, while in Chapter 6 Stephen Wildman examines another of his educational experiments, the use of photography to enable ordinary people to encounter the Old Masters and to 'see clearly'. Paul Jackson in Chapter 7 breaks new ground in revealing Ruskin's response to music, an art to which he responded deeply as a sensuous experience, while arguing that it could also act as an agent of moral improvement. In Chapter 8 Edward James examines Ruskin's only explicit foray into fairytale, 'The King of the Golden River', and links this back to his imaginative use of the fantastic and of fairyland images throughout his social and political writing.Ruskin was both a teacher and a preacher. His recollection in Praeterita of his first recorded speech, as a very small boy, 'People, Be Good!'1 suggests the trajectory of his adult career. Keith Hanley and Andrew Tate in the final chapters of this collection explore the links between his aesthetic and his religious views. Hanley in Chapter 9 picks up the notion of the absolute centrality of this Christian worldview to Ruskin's life and work and suggests the perils of 'secularising' him. In Chapter 10, Tate pursues Ruskin's apocalyptic vision. Ruskin believed that 'Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come'; for him, therefore, 'apocalypse' meant, not an ending, but a revelation.
Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States.
'Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement' challenges accepted scholarly wisdom regarding the life, personality and work of this once-famous Victorian scholar and churchman.
¿Bakhtin and his Others¿ offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin¿s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality, research into his theoretical backgrounds, and case studies where these insights are employed in literary analysis.
¿Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science¿ is an edited collection of essays by Gillian Beer, George Levine and other leading scholars, exploring the interaction between literature and science in the works of Darwin, Tennyson, Huxley and other major figures of the Victorian age.
'Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement' challenges accepted scholarly wisdom regarding the life, personality and work of this once-famous Victorian scholar and churchman.
Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ''Mapping the Nation'' offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870-1920. Centring upon the ''mapping'' of India - both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal - this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England, to illustrate how the variety of India''s poetical imagining corresponded to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography.
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov''s legacy and the Russian culture of that period.
This anthology is the first collection of primary science articles written by scientists working in America during the nineteenth century.
This volume is both an essential resource for undergraduates and graduates studying Victorian and Decadent literature and an instructive work for enthusiastic readers of verse. The wide span of the 1872-1900 epoch enables readers to appreciate in great depth the literary developments that led to the fin de siècle, unlike most studies of this period, which focus solely on the 1890s, with no relation to cultural and historical developments in the previous two important decades.
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world. Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly unique and valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov''s art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov''s poetics. The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov''s legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov''s creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.
An intriguing look at the marginal sciences of the nineteenth century and their influence on the culture of the period.
The book examines the text of Edward FitzGerald¿s three main versions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and features commentary on the origins, role and influence of the poem.
'Bakhtin and his Others' offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin's ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality, research into his theoretical backgrounds, and case studies where these insights are employed in literary analysis.
The first ever book on Mumbai written in the Marathi language, this is a historically fascinating and revealing urban biography of nineteenth-century India.
An insightful and illuminating collection of essays on the political and cultural dynamics of travel literature in the nineteenth century.
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