Victorian Identities PDF Download

Author: Ruth Robbins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349243493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Victorian period was one of enormous cultural diversity with places for figures as different as Alfred Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Victorian Identities simultaneously celebrates that diversity whilst drawing out the connections between disparate voices. With essays on the 'Greats' of the period - Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Wilde - as well as on the less well-known sensation writer, Rhoda Broughton, and on the formation of children's voices in Victorian literature - the collection rejects narrow definitions of the period and its values, and exposes its texts to readings informed by contemporary literary theory.

Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171998X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108706209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

Author: Heidi L. Pennington
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

Author: Jean Arnold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In this study of Victorian jewels and their representation, Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West. Diamonds and other gems, Arnold argues, symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered "prisms of culture." Mined in the far reaches of the empire, they traversed geographical space and cultural boundaries, representing monetary value and evoking empire, class lineage, class membership, gender relations, and aesthetics. Arnold analyzes the many roles material objects fill in Western culture and surveys the cross-cultural history of the Victorian diamond, uncovering how this object became both preeminent and representative of Victorian values. Her close readings of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, George Eliot's Middlemarch, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds show gendered, aesthetic, economic, fetishistic, colonial, legal, and culturally symbolic interpretations of jewelry as they are enacted through narrative. Taken together, these divergent interpretations offer a holistic view of a material culture's affective attachment to objects. As the assigned meanings of jewels turn them into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas, human interactions with gems elicit emotional responses that bind the materialist culture together.

Author: Stephen Arata
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521563526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siècle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siècle.

Author: Roger Swift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317965574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Author: Steve Attridge
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN: 9786610219278
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This work gives an account of the refashioning of ideas about national character in late Victorian culture, with a wide reference to literature and popular culture around the time of the Boer War, and a particular scrutiny of images of the soldier. In specific images, narratives and motifs, the book highlights dynamic tensions, between the external boundaries of empire and those of civil society, and between class antagonisms and national projections. Many new sources and materials are introduced to this field of study.

Author: Jean Arnold
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409421287
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West, arguing that gems symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered prisms of culture. Her close readings of works by Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope show jewels turned into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas that serve to bind the materialist culture together.

Author: Tracy C. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134934467
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Using historical evidence as well as personal accounts, Tracy C. Davis examines the reality of conditions for `ordinary' actresses, their working environments, employment patterns and the reasons why acting continued to be such a popular, though insecure, profession. Firmly grounded in Marxist and feminist theory she looks at representations of women on stage, and the meanings associated with and generated by them.