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Author: Sarah A. Willburn Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351909762 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
In her absorbing study of nineteenth-century mystical writings, Sarah Willburn formulates a new conception of individualism that offers a fresh look at Victorian subjectivity. Drawing upon extensive archival work in the British Library, Willburn analyzes séance accounts, novels about mediumship, and metaphysical treatises to make important connections between contemporary writings on mysticism and fictional works. Willburn presents the theories of compelling characters such as Newton Crosland and Lois Waisbrooker and provides exciting new readings of well-known texts by Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Martineau, and Corelli. An understanding of the Victorian fascination with mysticism, Willburn argues, leads to a better appreciation of cultural constructions of the citizen in England and of the public sphere. She introduces two key concepts against the backdrop of popular mysticism: "possessed individualism," a model for Victorian individualism based on spiritual possession, and "extra spheres," which complicate the traditional binary opposition of public and private. Together, these formulations urge us to rethink our views of Victorian political economy and gender as they pertain to mystical and religious practices.
Author: Sarah A. Willburn Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351909762 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
In her absorbing study of nineteenth-century mystical writings, Sarah Willburn formulates a new conception of individualism that offers a fresh look at Victorian subjectivity. Drawing upon extensive archival work in the British Library, Willburn analyzes séance accounts, novels about mediumship, and metaphysical treatises to make important connections between contemporary writings on mysticism and fictional works. Willburn presents the theories of compelling characters such as Newton Crosland and Lois Waisbrooker and provides exciting new readings of well-known texts by Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Martineau, and Corelli. An understanding of the Victorian fascination with mysticism, Willburn argues, leads to a better appreciation of cultural constructions of the citizen in England and of the public sphere. She introduces two key concepts against the backdrop of popular mysticism: "possessed individualism," a model for Victorian individualism based on spiritual possession, and "extra spheres," which complicate the traditional binary opposition of public and private. Together, these formulations urge us to rethink our views of Victorian political economy and gender as they pertain to mystical and religious practices.
Author: Deborah Wynne Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134772408 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.
Author: Tatiana Kontou Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317982517 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
Increasingly, contemporary scholarship reveals the strong connection between Victorian women and the world of the nineteenth-century supernatural. Women were intrinsically bound to the occult and the esoteric from mediums who materialised spirits to the epiphanic experiences of the New Woman, from theosophy to telepathy. This volume addresses the various ways in which Victorian women expressed themselves and were constructed by the occult through a broad range of texts. By examining the roles of women as automatic writing mediums, spiritualists, authors, editors, theosophists, socialists and how they interpreted the occult in their life and work, the contributors in this edition return to sensation novels, ghost stories, autobiographies, séances and fashionable magazines to access the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life. The variety of texts analysed by the authors in this collection demonstrates the many interpretations of the occult in nineteenth-century culture and the ways that women used supernatural imagery and language to draw attention to issues that bore immediate implications on their own lives. Either by catering for the fad of ghost stories or by giving public trance speeches women harnessed the metaphorical and financial forces of the supernatural. As the articles in this book demonstrate the occult was after all a female affair. This book was published as a special issue of Women's Writing.
Author: Hilary Grimes Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317026268 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.
Author: Kathryn Hughes Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 142142570X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.
Author: Galia Ofek Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351904183 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 437
Book Description
Galia Ofek's wide-ranging study elucidates the historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical meanings of the Victorians' preoccupation with hair. Victorian writers and artists, Ofek argues, had a well-developed awareness of fetishism as an overinvestment of value in a specific body part and were fully cognizant of hair's symbolic resonance and its value as an object of commerce. In particular, they were increasingly alert to the symbolic significance of hairstyling. Among the writers and artists Ofek considers are Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Herbert Spencer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Aubrey Beardsley. By examining fiction, poetry, anthropological and scientific works, newspaper reviews and advertisements, correspondence, jewellery, paintings, and cartoons, 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.
Author: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137342404 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004322256 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
Neo-Victorian Villains is the first edited collection to examine the afterlives of such Victorian villains as Dracula, Svengali, Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, exploring their representation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction. In addition, Neo-Victorian Villains examines a number of supposedly villainous types, from the spirit medium and the femme fatale to the imperial ‘native’ and the ventriloquist, and traces their development from Victorian times today. Chapters analyse recent theatre, films and television – from Ripper Street to Marvel superhero movies – as well as classic Hollywood depictions of Victorian villains. In a wide-ranging opening chapter, Benjamin Poore assesses the legacy of nineteenth-century ideas of villains and villainy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors are: Sarah Artt, Guy Barefoot, Jonathan Buckmaster, David Bullen, Helen Davies, Robert Dean, Marion Gibson, Richard Hand, Emma James, Mark Jones, Emma V. Miller, Claire O’Callaghan, Christina Parker-Flynn, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Natalie Russell, Gillian Piggott, Benjamin Poore and Rob Welch.
Author: Moniez Baptiste Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527500640 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.
Author: Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 1409489825 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstruct and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.
Author: Sarah A. Willburn
Author: Sarah A. Willburn
Author: Deborah Wynne
Author: Tatiana Kontou
Author: Hilary Grimes
Author: Kathryn Hughes
Author: Galia Ofek
Author: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Author: 
Author: Moniez Baptiste
Author: Dr Laurence Talairach-Vielmas