Behind the ancient artifacts displayed in our museums lies a secret history—of travel, desire, the quest for knowledge, and even theft. Such is the case with the objects of Mesoamerican culture so avidly collected by the Victorians. Informal Empire reveals how such objects and the cultures they embodied were incorporated into museum collections, panoramas, freak shows, adventure novels, and records of imperial administrators. With its original insights, Informal Empire points to a new way of thinking about British imperialism and, more generally, about the styles and forms of imperialism itself.
This book explores how the figure of theater allowed novels, novelists, and critics to position particular novels within a complex literary field and market. Novel genres high and low, male and female, public and private, realistic and romantic, all came to identify themselves within a set of coordinates that included—if only for the purpose of exclusion—the spectacular figure of theater. In readings of novels by Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Jewsbury, Flaubert, Braddon, and Moore, Allen shows how theater figures—actively and importantly—in what we have come to look back on as the history of the novel.
Manufacturing Culture argues that early Victorian advocates of industry crafted a new proindustrial rhetoric by actively portraying automatic manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. The book traces the emergence of this rhetoric in two mutually reinforcing discourses--the contentious debates over the factory system that ran throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and the extensive discussions of “design” that culminated in the Great Exhibition–and concludes by examining Ruskin’s and Morris’s later efforts to counter its polemical force in their own writings. A review of the book by George Landow is available on the Victorian Web at <http://www.victorianweb.org/technology/bizup1.html>.
Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman rediscovers over 900 collections of women’s biographies published in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere 1830-1940. These popular illustrated albums challenge assumptions about the traditional restriction of history and biography to masculine, individual subjects. Catalogues of queens, saints, and courtesans made room for newly celebrated examples, from reformers to assassins, offering wider latitude than fiction or conduct literature. Featuring such biographers as Anna Jameson and subjects such as Queen Victoria, Booth suggests that prosopographies, or series of personae, model communities and subjects today as in the Victorian period.
The book examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all “primitive” or “savage” races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Often this fate was held to be the result of savage customs: warfare, cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifice, which turned the discourse into a form of blaming the victim. It surveys the discourse in North America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia, and contends that, more often than not, “doomed race theories” acted as self-fulfilling prophecies. It tracks the discourse in many genres, from the journalistic to the scientific, and across a wide spectrum of ideological positions, from humanitarian to social Darwinian.
James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton UP, early 2005)
The book examines the role played by British novels of the romantic and Victorian eras in the prehistory of the modern anthropological culture-concept, suggesting that such works were animated by the autoethnographic mission of crafting fictions of a pluralistic and contingent British culture in reaction against the self-universalizing temptations afforded to Britons by a seemingly unstoppable commercial and imperial expansion
Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became staples of Victorian culture, the 'Family Bible with Notes' has received little attention until now. Published in parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family's status and its sense of national and imperial identity. In Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, Mary Wilson Carpenter provides intriguing insights into sexuality, religion, and women's changing roles as she examines the 'family values' of the English Family Bible.
This study examines the origins, development and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. It analyzes a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres (autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories and dictionaries). Julie Codell discerns the multiple, often conflicting identities, whether innocent, professional, or degenerate, that were ascribed to artists collectively and as individuals, and the different ways in which life writing genres gendered Victorian artistic identities. Her book provides a sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.
This book explores imperial identities of Britain and its colonies: South Africa, India, Australia, Wales. Exploring a variety of press media (gazetteers, atlases, journals, wire service, press organizations), essays in this book argue for the press as a site of resistance and revision, as well as of colonial authority, shaping and reflecting emerging, hybrid national identities. Scholars from Canada, UK, US, Australia, and India analyze British and colonial writings, drawing on history, literature, anthropology, art history, and new gender, imperial, and media studies. Through the press colonizers and colonized dialogued, argued, and represented themselves and each other to shape government policy and public images of ethnicities, imperial fantasies, and national histories.
Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is the first book of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830. The volume undertakes a collective rethinking of the national and period categories that have structured British literary history across the vexed divide between a Scottish Enlightenment and a presumptively English Romanticism. Contributors: Alyson Bardsley, John Barrell, Adriana Craciun, Cairns Craig, Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, Ina Ferris, Penny Fielding, Peter Manning, Susan Manning, Jerome McGann, Ann Wierda Rowland, James Watt.
This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture to offer an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign could be esteemed among the greatest of artists. Between these extremes stretches a century of ideological contention between alternative representations of authorship. Combining literary sociology and close readings, the book offers an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced—and ultimately shattered—the Victorians' understanding of their great novelists.
In Friendship's Bonds (August, 2004), Richard Dellamora revisits the classical and Victorian dream that a just society would be one governed by friends. In the actual struggles concerning citizenship, however, the ideal of fraternity was troubled by anxieties about the commingling of populations and the possible conversion of male intimacy into sexual anarchy. Focusing on the writings of Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone, the book examines works as various as Karl Marx's essay on the Jewish Question, Victorian Bible commentaries, and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, as well as novels by Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, and Henry James.
Dennis Denisoff, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (Broadview, 2004).
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories, edited by Dennis Denisoff, is "a ground-breaking contribution to teaching and research, with a wide-ranging and original selection of stories" (Elaine Showalter). Aimed at the undergraduate classroom, it includes an extensive introduction, critical essays on the subject by Poe, Dickens, Oliphant and others, and 26 stories (including gothic works; adventure stories; colonial works, science fiction, children's tales; New Woman writing; and Irish yarns). It includes stories by Shelley, Dickens, De Quincey, Collins, Gaskell, Trollope, Braddon, Swinburne, Carroll, Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilde, Conan Doyle, Egerton, Leverson, Wells, Zangwill, and others.
Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (U of Minnesota P, 2004).
Skeptical Feminism considers the ambivalence many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a resistance to abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism, Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. Carolyn Dever (Vanderbilt University) is the author of Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud (1998) and coeditor of The Literary Channel (2002).
This volume considers how Victorian texts often construct Romantic nervousness at odds with Victorian self-restraint and stolidity. This nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. The volume’s essays explore a variety of discursive modes and genres, and authors both inside and outside the category of "Victorian Romanticism": the Brownings, Carlyle, Sara Coleridge and her father, De Quincey, Eliot, Gaskell, Keats, Lampman, Mill, the Shelleys, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth.
No study has explored the reason why such contending claims were made for poetry in the nineteenth century: that it is a panacea for the ills of the age and that it is a pandemic at the heart of the social order. The former position was originally associated particularly with Scott's poetry; the latter with Byron's, while Tennyson assumed a position between the two. In exploring the logic behind these attributions, Perversity brings to light a host of previously unexplored medical and historical material while arguing that the medical rhetoric associated with all three authors served to undercut the surprising influence of these poets on the emergent mass market, on political ceremony, and on revolutionary radicalism.
Pamela M. Fletcher, Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture 1895-1914 (Ashgate, 2003).
Problem pictures were an extraordinarily popular feature of the Edwardian Royal Academy. The ambiguous, often slightly risqué paintings of modern life were conversation pieces whose meaning was hotly debated in public and private. At a time when the question “How might art best address itself to and be addressed by a modern world?” was fiercely contested, the problem picture supplied one populist answer. By 1914, however, the pictures had been swept from the walls of an embarrassed Academy, standing as a symbol of all that modernist aesthetics deplored. Narrating Modernity tells the story of this forgotten genre, and uses it to illuminate the transition and dialogue between the Victorian and Modern eras.
This book reads nineteenth-century Gothic fiction as a highly self-conscious mode. Instead of celebrating supposed subversive effects, it shows both how Gothic works in dialogue with the norms of realism and how it reflects on narrative itself as a dialogical transaction, tracing productive tensions and exchanges between Gothic extremity and common experience. Topics include Poe’s theory and practice of the tale in relation to earlier instances of Gothic reflexivity, the great monster stories of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, and the role of Gothic elements in the tales and novels of Dickens, Eliot, and James.
This book explores how medical and social maps helped shape modern perceptions of space. The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. The volume addresses perceptions of space both in metropolitan London and in British India.
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to Victorian Britain, with its decentralized and voluntarist institutional culture. Focusing on a wide range of writing—including Dickens, Martineau, Mill, Trollope, and Wells—Goodlad delves into contemporary debates over organized charity, the New Poor Law, public health, education, and civil service reform. Her readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. This timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance thus speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.
This book offers a new approach to New Woman criticism by focusing on the diverse strategies and revisionist aesthetics of three of the key exponents of New Woman fiction. Spirituality, and especially spiritualism and theosophy, offered alternative discourses which accommodated the needs of a female counter-culture and whose neo-religious language and rhetorical appeal lent itself to feminist encodings of the socially committed artist. Seeking to revise authoritative cultural and aesthetic discourses, each writer drew on, mimicked, feminised, and transformed traditional literary and cultural tropes and paradigms: femininity (Grand), allegory (Schreiner), and mythology (Caird).
The fourteen essays in this collection explore the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK (England, Wales, and Ireland), the US, Canada, Europe (Germany and Hungary), and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the fin-de-siècle and early twentiethth-century 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure within international consumer culture, periodical press representations, and feminist writings.
The five novels in this anthology (Eliza Lynn Linton's The Rebel of the Family, Walter Besant's The Revolt of Man, Arabella Kenealy's Dr Janet of Harley Street, C.E. Raimond's (Elizabeth Robins') George Mandeville's Husband, and Grant Allen's The Type-Writer Girl) offer a variety of narrative plots and strategies which explore central fin-de-siècle anxieties about shifting gender relations. Troubled female anti-feminism (Linton, Kenealy) and punitive male anti-feminism (Besant) is juxtaposed with anti/feminist ventriloquism, whose radical instability is reflected in its authorial cross-dressing (Robins speaking in the voice of an oppressed husband and Allen in that of a boisterous New Woman).
Laura Fasick, Professional Men and Domesticity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (Edwin Mellen P, 2003).
This book examines novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell in light of Thomas Carlyle’s theories about the importance of work. Fasick’s examination pinpoints ways in which the fictional treatments of work complicate, modify, and often undercut the theories they purportedly uphold. The book includes chapters on the figure of the author, the doctor, and the priest, as well as a concluding chapter on Dickens’s treatment of work in his final two completed novels.
Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (Palgrave, 2003).
This handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction. Beginning with a survey of major theorists and approaches, and using clearly defined terms, Narrative Form explains critical vocabulary and offers a variety of strategies for analyzing the formal qualities of fiction. Keen suggests that interpretations of form can be effectively integrated with contemporary approaches to literature, including feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies methodologies. Narrative Form shows how to use the language of formal analysis accurately and innovatively.
Romances of the Archive offers a lively discussion of the debates about the uses of the past contained in British fiction since the Falklands crisis. Keen provides a detailed examination of the range of contemporary 'romances of the archive,' a genre in which British novelists both deal with the loss of Empire and a nostalgia for the past, and react to the postimperial condition of Great Britain. Keen identifies the genre and explains its literary sources from Edmund Spenser to HP Lovecraft and John LeCarre. She also accounts for the rise in popularity of the archival romance and provides a context for understanding the British postimperial preoccupation with history and heritage.
A/Moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-Century England intervenes in traditional histories of the emergence of economic science in nineteenth-century England. Using discourse history and rhetorical analysis, Claudia Klaver revises traditional historiographies of economic “thought,” “theory,” and “science” by examining how these terms are constituted through the writings and cultural contexts of classical political economists. Klaver traces the complex and uneven development of fundamental economic notions through texts by Ricardo, McCulloch, Martineau, Dickens, J. S. Mill, Ruskin and Jevons to demonstrate the significance of noncanonical, as well as canonical, economic writing to the emergence of the nineteenth-century economic science.
This book makes the case that a startling array of nineteenth-century thinkers—from John Ruskin and Michael Faraday to Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins—understood suspenseful plots as ideal vehicles for disseminating an experience of doubt, training readers to pause before leaping to conclusions. Far from being complacently conservative, suspense was deliberately employed to encourage a commitment to skepticism and uncertainty. Mid-Victorian writers began to call this approach "realism." Offering original readings of canonical texts, including Modern Painters, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and drawing on a range of sources, from popular fiction and art criticism to the philosophy of science and scientific biography, Levine combines narrative theory and the history of ideas to offer a new reading of Victorian realism.
This edition of Martineau’s history consists primarily of the History of the Peace: Being a History of England from 1816 to 1854, as well as the introductory History of England, AD 1800 to 1815. Martineau’s work thus encompasses British history from the turn of the nineteenth century through the Crimean War. Along with extensive annotations, this edition features a comprehensive introduction discussing Martineau’s life and work, her role as a historian, her pioneering contributions to the emerging discipline of historiography as well as the work’s reception history. Also included in this edition is Martineau’s England and Her Soldiers and the unpublished correspondence between Martineau and Florence Nightingale.
One of the earliest examples of social problem writing, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) established the journalist (and novelist) Harriet Martineau as a pioneer in the field of practical political economy and as an insightful commentator on the expanding British Empire. The four tales from Illustrations of Political Economy featured in this Broadview Edition are Weal and Woe in Garveloch, A Manchester Strike, Cousin Marshall, and Sowers not Reapers. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a wide selection of primary documents that situate the tales within their literary, social, and historical contexts.
This set focuses on Harriet Martineau's writings on imperialism. The selected texts are introduced and annotated, thus providing a substantial historical and social context through which to measure the worth of her participation in this discourse. The edition will be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women’s writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.
Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh present a generous sampling of Swinburne’s poetry and prose. This wide-ranging collection satisfies a long need for a comprehensive selection of Swinburne’s work. It includes all of Atalanta, all of Tristram of Lyonesse, plus large selections from the huge corpus of uncollected and unpublished work, prose and verse both. It is accompanied by learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.
Journalist, suffragist, antivivisectionist, theologian, essayist and activist Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) has never been the subject of a full-length biography. Long before the term New Woman was invented, she was an independent professional woman who staked out her own moral and intellectual positions, earned an adequate income, traveled alone both at home and abroad, and lived with another independent woman as her beloved friend. Using new sources that include letters, anonymous journalism, and materials in family hands, this narrative biography traces Cobbe's life in the context of Victorian political and social debates.
Subjects on Display explores a paradoxical figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the conspicuously self-effacing woman. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history to argue that this figure appears in response to a changing socioeconomic landscape, one in which the ideal of the modest woman was outliving its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority. The psychical dimensions of display—the desires, pleasures, and anxieties associated with being the object of the look—further complicated its meanings. Newman explores the experience of offering oneself to be seen in works by C. Brontë, Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James. Shifting the emphasis from the spectator or observer to the “subject of display,” she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.
Linda H. Peterson, ed. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (2nd ed., St. Martins, 2003).
This revised critical edition presents the 1847 text of Brontë's novel along with critical essays that read Wuthering Heights from four contemporary critical perspectives. The essays are by Philip K. Wion (psychoanalytic), Terry Eagleton (Marxist), Nancy Armstrong (cultural studies), and Lynn Pykett (feminist). A fifth essay by Susan Meyer demonstrates how several critical perspectives can be combined. Each critical essay is accompanied by an introduction to the critical perspective and by a bibliography. The text and essays are complemented by a biographical introduction, a selection of cultural documents, a survey of critical responses to the novel since its initial publication, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms.
John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford UP, 2003).
Far from the hushed restraint associated with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. Picker chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, drawing upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.
This book traces the rhetorical connection between secrecy and democracy in Victorian England by showing how often attempts to secure more equitable representation were met by accusations of conspiracy. Borrowing from the fearsome reputation of the Thugs, the Jesuits, the Fenians, the Carbonari and others, such denunciations were deployed to represent reformers as dangerously "unEnglish." Using close readings of a range of primary texts, both literary and nonliterary, the book examines the ways in which this exclusionary rhetoric was often complicated, if not frustrated altogether, by the contemporary culture's tacit attraction to practices of secrecy.
This is the first book to examine the British empire’s direct impact on Britain’s domestic society and culture in the 19th century, in context and without pre-assumptions. The conclusions it comes to are radically different from some current orthodoxies, especially those of certain cultural scholars. In a nutshell, ‘imperialism’ was a very minority and marginal discourse in British culture; which tells us far more both about that culture and about imperialism than do the traces that the latter left on the former.
In Detecting the Nation Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority.
Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies is a comprehensive guide to recent critical approaches. Topics covered include Gay Studies, Feminist Criticism, Material Culture, Religion, Philosophy, Performance Studies, Aestheticism, Biography, Textual Studies and Postcolonial Theory. The book is designed to acquaint readers of all levels with the history of scholarship in a range of fields and suggest ways that Wilde's work offer new areas for research. The collection also provides a chronology and detailed bibliography.
Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in 19th-century definitions of homosexual identity. Frederick S. Roden charts the emergence of the modern homosexual in relation to religious, not exclusively sociological discourses. Positing Catholicism as complementary to classical Greece, he challenges the separatism of sexuality and religion in critical practice. Moving from Newman and Rossetti, to Hopkins, Wilde, and Michael Field amongst others, this book claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.
Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. This engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.
Forthcoming in paperback: Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Cornell UP, January 2005).
"Narrating Reality generates an original and affirmative account about nineteenth-century realism . . . targeted very effectively against the dominant critical positions on realism of our times. Shaw incorporates the most important texts on realism written over the past hundred years, while also ranging broadly over philosophical and theoretical works. . . . All in all, Shaw's analysis is more rigorous and more clarifying than anything I have read on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years. It is without question the most original defense of realism I have come across in a long time."--John Kucich, University of Michigan
Linda
M. Shires, Coming Home : A Woman's Story Of Conversion To Judaism
(Basic Books, 2003).
Part memoir, part affirmation of feminist Jewish studies, part textual analysis, this hybrid book—woven of chapters and interchapters—tells the story of one woman's conversion to a religious tradition, Conservative Judaism. Moving from New England to Princeton to the Holocaust camps of Germany, and back again, the book expands our idea of what constitutes a spiritual journey and a religious practice.
This New Riverside Edition of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is the 1920 imprint of the 1912 Wessex Edition. The volume includes an Introduction, glossary, notes, chronology and further reading list, alongside Hardy's prefaces to the first and later editions, the poem "Tess's Lament," a map of Wessex, and the short story "On the Western Circuit." The volume notably features other Victorian materials: on gothic style by John Ruskin, on sexual selection by Charles Darwin, and on marriage and the status of women by Mona Caird. Twentieth-century essays included are by Penny Boumelha, John Goode, and Peter Widdowson.
Margaret D. Stetz, Gender and the London Theatre, 1880-1920 (Rivendale P, 2004).
At the turn of the last century, London was a city filled with theatres. Meanwhile, the visual imagery of that theatrical world circulated everywhere, and it knew no geographical boundaries. Much of that imagery highlighted the subject of gender. The theatre was both the center of social transformation and its mirror—the place where, quite literally, new roles for women and men were being enacted and a site that reflected shifts occurring in the larger political environment. This volume explores the links between changing notions of gender and sexuality and changes in the London theatre. It draws its material from the vast print culture that surrounded the stage: playbills, reviews, posters, photographs, drawings, advertisements, books, serial publications, printed ephemera, and postcards.
The Victorians since 1901 provides a much-needed survey of trends in the modern historiography of nineteenth-century Britain. Bringing together a group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, English literature, art history and cultural studies, it identifies and assesses the principal influences on twentieth-century attitudes towards the Victorians. Developments in academia, popular culture, public history and the internet are covered in this important and stimulating collection, and the final chapters anticipate future global trends in interpretations of the Victorian era, making an essential volume for students of Victorian Studies.
Mid-Victorian liberals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold championed an idea of individual "many-sided" agency. Cultivating Victorians explicates that vision and shows how it went on to define key aspects of Victorian aestheticism, as artists and writers increasingly claimed for art a special kind of self-reflecting power. Cases span diverse cultural contexts, from the agential rhetoric of John Ruskin and the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of reproducing his artworks. In addition to its redemptive account of several liberal intellectual premises, the study also critiques contemporary anti-liberalist argumentation.
Although many think "Generation X" is a recently coined label for the post-Baby Boom generation, the term "Generation X" originated in the early 1950s and has long been associated with specific (sub)cultural identities, including mods, rockers, and punks. The contributors to GenXegesis: Essays on Alternative Youth (Sub)Culture re-situate the term in its overlooked (sub)cultural context, offering a critical assessment of the Generation X phenomenon and its relation to the fashioning of differing identities within and against the mainstream. The essays explore a variety of topics, including punk subculture, alternative music, zines, reality television, postmodernism, academia, and the internet. Together, the contributors share a refreshingly self-conscious approach to Generation X's precarious and paradoxical position as an alternative to the mainstream.
Robyn Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Ohio State UP, 2003).
This book investigates the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. Elaborating on Warhol's theory of affect and focusing on sentimentalism, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas, the book looks at how the patterns of feelings that these Victorian and modern genres evoke can work to produce gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.