A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118624483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Book Description
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.

Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Sabine Schülting
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317392612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
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.

Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Nadine Boehm-Schnitker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134614691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Deborah Lutz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107077443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Galia Ofek
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754661610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Examining a wide range of historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical works, Galia Ofek shows how changing patterns of power relations between women and patriarchy are rendered anew when viewed through the lens of Victorian hair codes and imagery during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her innovative study reveals the Victorians' well-developed awareness of fetishism and their cognizance of hair's symbolic resonance and commercial value.

Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Maureen Moran
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826488831
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
An introduction to Victorian literature and its context from 1837-1900 includes historical, cultural, political, and intellectual background.

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137602198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.

A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631204633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
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.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture

Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886996
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Stimulating and informative new essays on many aspects of nineteenth-century culture.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Author: Allen MacDuffie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139993291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.