Author: Natalie Prizel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192888587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511
Book Description
Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated—particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty—the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for "innocence of the eye," which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.
Victorian Ethical Optics
Author: Natalie Prizel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192888587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511
Book Description
Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated—particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty—the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for "innocence of the eye," which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192888587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511
Book Description
Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated—particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty—the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for "innocence of the eye," which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.
A Companion to the Victorian Novel
Author: William Baker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313011176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
Victorian novels remain enormously popular today: some continue to be made into films, while authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are firmly established in the canon and taught at all levels. These works have also attracted a great deal of critical attention, with much current scholarship examining the novel in relation to its historical, political, and cultural contexts. This reference book is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a fresh account of past, current, and new directions in scholarship. The volume is divided into several broad sections, with chapters in each section treating more specialized topics. The first section looks at the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on the growth of serialization and the development of the novel of syndication. The second explores significant social and cultural facets of nineteenth-century British literature, while the third discusses the principal features of different genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, detective fiction, the social problem novel, and contemporary film adaptations. Individual authors are examined in the fourth section, while the fifth overviews various critical approaches and their application to nineteenth-century fiction.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313011176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
Victorian novels remain enormously popular today: some continue to be made into films, while authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are firmly established in the canon and taught at all levels. These works have also attracted a great deal of critical attention, with much current scholarship examining the novel in relation to its historical, political, and cultural contexts. This reference book is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a fresh account of past, current, and new directions in scholarship. The volume is divided into several broad sections, with chapters in each section treating more specialized topics. The first section looks at the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on the growth of serialization and the development of the novel of syndication. The second explores significant social and cultural facets of nineteenth-century British literature, while the third discusses the principal features of different genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, detective fiction, the social problem novel, and contemporary film adaptations. Individual authors are examined in the fourth section, while the fifth overviews various critical approaches and their application to nineteenth-century fiction.
Victorian Technology
Author: Herbert Sussman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313082855
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
An enlightening history of 19th-century technology, focusing on the connections between invention and cultural values. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine captures the extraordinary surge of energy and invention that catapulted 19th-century England into the position of the world's first industrialized nation. It was an astonishing transformation, one that shaped—and was shaped by—the values of the Victorian era, and that laid the groundwork for the consumer-based society in which we currently live. Filled with vivid details and fascinating insights into the impact of the Industrial Revolution on peoples' lives, Victorian Technology locates the forerunners of the defining technologies of the our time in 19th-century England: the computer, the Internet, mass transit, and mass communication. Readers will encounter the innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs behind history-making breakthroughs in communications (the transatlantic cable, wireless communication), mass production (the integrated factory), transportation (railroads, gliders, automobiles), and more.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313082855
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
An enlightening history of 19th-century technology, focusing on the connections between invention and cultural values. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine captures the extraordinary surge of energy and invention that catapulted 19th-century England into the position of the world's first industrialized nation. It was an astonishing transformation, one that shaped—and was shaped by—the values of the Victorian era, and that laid the groundwork for the consumer-based society in which we currently live. Filled with vivid details and fascinating insights into the impact of the Industrial Revolution on peoples' lives, Victorian Technology locates the forerunners of the defining technologies of the our time in 19th-century England: the computer, the Internet, mass transit, and mass communication. Readers will encounter the innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs behind history-making breakthroughs in communications (the transatlantic cable, wireless communication), mass production (the integrated factory), transportation (railroads, gliders, automobiles), and more.
Calendar of Victoria University in Federation with the University of Toronto
Routledge Revivals: Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999)
Author: Colin Trodd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351044451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
Originally published in 1999, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque is the first fully interdisciplinary study of the subject and examines a wide range of sources and materials to provide new readings between ‘style’ and ‘concept’. The book provides an original analysis of key articulations of the Grotesque in the literary culture of Ruskin, Browning and Dickens, where represents the eruptions, intensities, confusions and disturbed vitality of modern cultural experience such as the scientific revolution associated with Darwin and the nature of industrial society.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351044451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
Originally published in 1999, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque is the first fully interdisciplinary study of the subject and examines a wide range of sources and materials to provide new readings between ‘style’ and ‘concept’. The book provides an original analysis of key articulations of the Grotesque in the literary culture of Ruskin, Browning and Dickens, where represents the eruptions, intensities, confusions and disturbed vitality of modern cultural experience such as the scientific revolution associated with Darwin and the nature of industrial society.
The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud
Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Book Description
In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward. At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Book Description
In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward. At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.
The Optical Journal and Review of Optometry. ...
Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
Author: Adela Pinch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
Evolution and Ethics
Author: James G. Paradis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086030X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to their needs, and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086030X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to their needs, and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
No Place for Ethics
Author: T. Patrick Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933249
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of law—law simply because so ordered—as something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful. To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933249
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of law—law simply because so ordered—as something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful. To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.