The Victorian Eye

Author: Chris Otter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226640787
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.

John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye

Author: Susan P. Casteras
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 9780810937666
Category : Art criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
Susan Phelps Gordon, Curator of European Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, relates Ruskin's critical reaction to the art of his time, including the infamous Whistler vs. Ruskin libel trial of 1878 as well as Ruskin's relationships with and aspirations for the artists he supported. Anthony Lacy Gully, Associate Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, explores Ruskin's fascination with the natural world and his clashes with the scientific community. Susan P. Casteras, Curator of Paintings at the Yale Center for British Art and a lecturer in art history at Yale College, looks at Ruskin's theories on museums and their installations as he applied them in his Saint George's Museum, which he founded for the education of the miners of Sheffield

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
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.

Death on Ireland's Eye

Author: Dean Ruxton
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 0717188930
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
A tragic death, a murder trial and a 170-year-old mystery – but what really happened? Shortly after Maria Kirwan died in a lonely inlet on Ireland's Eye, it was decided that she had drowned accidentally during a day spent with her husband on the picturesque island. This inquest verdict appeared to conclude the melancholy events that consumed the fishing village of Howth, Co Dublin, in September 1852. But not long afterwards, suspicion fell upon Maria's husband, William Burke Kirwan, as whispers of unspeakable cruelty, an evil character and a secret life rattled through the streets of Dublin. Investigations led to William's arrest and trial for murder. The story swelled into one of the most bitterly divisive chapters in the dark annals of Irish criminal history. Yet questions remain: Does the evidence stand up? What role did the heavy hand of Victorian moral outrage play? Was William really guilty of murder, or did the ever-present 'moral facts' fill in gaps where hard proof was absent? Now, this compelling modern analysis revisits the key evidence, asking sober questions about the facts, half-facts and fantasies buried within the yellowed pages of the Ireland's Eye case files.

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

Author: John Glendening
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134088345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.

Lover's Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection

Author:
Publisher: Giles
ISBN: 9781911282938
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

The opulent eye : late victorian and edwardian taste in interior design

Author: Nicholas Cooper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

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.

Naturalistic Photography For Students of the Art

Author: P.H Emerson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3752407921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Reproduction of the original: Naturalistic Photography For Students of the Art by P.H Emerson

Victorian Science and Imagery

Author: Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher: Sci & Culture in the Nineteent
ISBN: 9780822946533
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories--such as Darwin's theory of evolution and sexual selection--deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.