Author: Rene Denfeld Publisher: Grand Central Publishing ISBN: 0446565237 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Journalist Rene Denfeld explains why her generation has become alienated from the women's movement, maintaining that the actions of the movement's current leadership have actually encouraged a return to the kind of sexual repression and political powerlessness challenged by feminists in the 1970s. Here she offers a practial battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.
Author: Stephen Pimpare Publisher: ISBN: 9781565848399 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Parallels between anti-welfare propagandists of the nineteenth century and well-funded policy research organizations of today are uncovered, revealing lessons that emphasize the needed support for state defense of the poor.
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: Leah Price Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400842182 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 361
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.
Author: Matthew Sweet Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 1466872713 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
Author: A. N. Wilson Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9780393049749 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 778
Book Description
Wilson singles out those whose lives illuminate the 19th century--Darwin, Marx, Gladstone, Kipling, and others--and explains through these signature lives how Victorian England started a revolution that still hasn't ended. of illustrations.
Author: Paul Roland Publisher: Oldcastle Books ISBN: 1843442507 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
What began in the late 1980s as an underground community of science fantasy aficionados with a fetish for Victoriana now pervades almost every aspect of popular culture from music and movies to comics and computer games. Steampunk is much more than a retro-futuristic fashion statement or a subgenre of science fiction. On the surface its adherents profess a penchant for neo-Victorian fashion, fanciful clockwork accessories and have a desire to live in an alternative reality inhabited by airships and eccentric inventions. But the literature, art, music and movies of this burgeoning community offer a radical and irreverent re-imagining of society the way it might have evolved had history taken a sharp detour prior to the industrial revolution giving us a world without electricity, the infernal (sic) combustion engine and the technology that we take for granted today. The world of steampunk is the elegant gas lit world of Jules Verne and HG Wells, of Michael Moorcock and their literary antecedents for whom the digital age never dawned. Author and musician Paul Roland traces the history of Steampunk, covering every element of the genre, from fashion and jewelry to music and literature, drawing on exclusive quotes from leading writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the field.
Author: Brenda Cossman Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479802743 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
Revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm in the #MeToo era #MeToo’s stunning explosion on social media in October 2017 radically changed—and amplified—conversations about sexual violence as it revealed how widespread the issue is and toppled prominent celebrities and politicians. But, as the movement spread, a conflict emerged among feminist supporters and detractors about how punishment should be doled out and how justice should be served. The New Sex Wars reveals that these clashes are nothing new. Delving into the contentious debates from the ’70s and ‘80s, Brenda Cossman traces the striking echoes in the feminist divisions of this earlier period. In exploring the history of past conflicts—the resistance to finding common ground, the media’s pleasure in portraying the debates as polarized cat fights, the simplification of viewpoints as pro- and anti-sex—she shows how they have come to shape the #MeToo era. From the ’70s to today, Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. By circumventing law altogether, #MeToo has led us to question whether justice can be served outside of the courtroom. Cossman argues for a different way forward—one based on reparative models that focus on shared desired outcomes and the willingness to understand the other side. Thoughtful and compelling, The New Sex Wars explores what can been learned from these stories, what traps we repeatedly fall into, how we have been denied our anger, and where to begin to make law work.
Author: Courtenay Raia Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022663535X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 443
Book Description
The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.
Author: Tom Mole Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691202923 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.
Author: Rene Denfeld
Author: Stephen Pimpare
Author: Kathryn Hughes
Author: Leah Price
Author: Matthew Sweet
Author: A. N. Wilson
Author: Paul Roland
Author: Brenda Cossman
Author: Courtenay Raia
Author: Tom Mole