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Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people's language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and

This book uses the nineteenth-century legend of Spring-heeled Jack to analyse and challenge current notions of Victorian popular cultures. Drawing upon a rich variety of primary source material, 'The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack' provides a fascinating insight into Victorian cultures and will appeal to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century English cultural and social history, folklore and literature

"The Late-Victorian cultural mission to London's slums was a peculiar effort towards social reform that today is largely forgotten or misunderstood. The philanthropy of middle and upper-class social workers saw hundreds of art exhibitions, concerts of fine music, evening lectures, clubs and socials, debates and excursions mounted for the benefit of impoverished and working-class Londoners. Ginn's vivid and provocative book captures many of these in detail for the first time. In refreshing our understanding of this obscure but eloquent activism, Ginn approaches cultural philanthropy not simply as a project of class self-interest, nor as fanciful 'missionary aestheticism.' Rather, he shows how liberal aspirations towards adult education and civic community can be traced in a number of centres of moralising voluntary effort. Concentrating on Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, the People's Palace in Mile End, Red Cross Hall in Southwark and the Bermondsey Settlement, the discussion identifies the common impulses animating practical reformers across these settings. Drawing on new primary research to clarify reformers' underlying intentions and strategies, Ginn shows how these were shaped by a distinctive diagnosis of urban deprivation and anomie. In rebutting the common view that cultural philanthropy was a crudely paternalistic attempt to impose 'rational recreation' on the poor, this volume explores its sources in a liberal-minded social idealism common to both religious and secular conceptions of social welfare in this period. Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late-Victorian London appeals to students and researchers of Victorian culture, moral reform, urbanism, adult education and philanthropy, who will be fascinated by this underrated but lively aspect of the period's social activism."--Publisher's description

This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of 'religion' and 'belief', it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity.

Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual identity. 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, Same-Sex Desire claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.

In Beastly Possessions, Sarah Amato chronicles the unusual ways in which Victorians of every social class brought animals into their daily lives.

Cultural Rhetoric is the tool with which culture makes society reinvent itself through language. In Victorian Culture, the struggle to be represented supposed a look to the future through a return to the classical world by means of the updating of Rhetoric. In other words, the interest in the ancient societies of Asia and the Mediterranean had awakened within Victorian society. In this updating process, Cultural Rhetoric achieves a new approach to the concepts of Politics, Gender and Society. For this reason, Cultural Rhetoric manages to be that specific instrument with which new cultural acceptances are made within Victorian Society ; La Retórica Cultural es el instrumento con el que la cultura hace que la sociedad se reinventa a si misma a través del lenguaje. En la Cultura Victoriana, la lucha por ser representado supuso una mirada al futuro desde un regreso al mundo clásico mediante la actualización de la Retórica. En otras palabras, el interés por las antiguas sociedades de Asia y el Mediterráneo había sido despertado en el seno de la Sociedad Victoriana. En ese proceso de actualización, la Retórica Cultural logra un nuevo intento de aproximación a los conceptos de Política, Género y Sociedad. Por esta razón, la Retórica Cultural consigue ser ese instrumento específico con el que se realizan nuevas aceptaciones culturales en el seno de la Sociedad Victoriana ; Este trabajo es resultado de investigación realizada en el proyecto de I+D+I de referencia PGC2018-093852-B-I00 del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades