Suchergebnisse

From sociological studies of urban squalor and sanitary reform, to critiques of the politics of prostitution, pathology, poverty, and criminology, criticism has tended to read nineteenth-century "decay" as an ideological apparatus keyed to the discursive policing of wayward, diseased, and abnormal body. Read through the Victorian theories of degeneration and decadence, on the one hand, and the contemporary discourses of defilement and abjection, on the other, criticism has tended to cast decay has a symbolic register for the period's ideological investment in normative progressive development, such that backwardness, depravity, and devolution are reified and read as symptomatic fears of taxonomic transgression. As my project demonstrates, however, in their minute and sustained attentions to the periodic pattern of dissolution and re-formation, the Victorians came to view decay as the conditional possibility for form's continual emergence. Decay was not "matter out of place." It was matter ceaselessly reforming itself on the stream of time. This conception of decay, in turn, reconfigures our critical interpretation of the Victorian ideologies of life, growth, progress, and reform. Decay does not pathologically mark the failure of progressive ideology; instead, it expresses the plasticity necessary for ceaseless growth. Recuperating the temporal dynamics of formation-in-decay, this project rethinks the categorical coordinates of abjection and defilement. In a world where everything—the pulsations of electromagnetic waves, the geomorphic crust of the earth, the mineralogical components of crystals, and, of course, the cellular tissues of biological bodies—was constantly dissolving and recombining, it does not make sense to speak of the singular, delimited subject's confrontation with the contaminating, liminal object. Rather, we must speak of the multiple, heterogeneous, and simultaneous "interabsorption" of subjects and objects. In their investigations of this horizontal relationality, the Victorian theorists of decay emphasized the rhythms of doing and undoing and, thus, folded the abject processes of expulsion and rejection into the experience of growth and development. Accordingly, this project focuses on the self-formation of the porous individual in relationship to the ever-dissolving and ever-renewing world. I argue that these manifold entities mutually emerged through the shared rhythms of decay – eddies and rests, drifts and advances – revealing the possibilities that linger in formlessness. Decay's negations, thus, allowed for radical conceptions of receptivity, as the individual pocketed and secreted temporal absences that allowed for potent possibilities – ethical rebirth, transhistorical connectivity, exquisite moments of ecstasy. Turning to the tremulous self-formations of Esther Summerson and Richard Carstone in Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1852-53), the nubile girls of Winnington Hall in John Ruskin's The Ethics of the Dust (1865), the budding aesthete in Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and the doomed Lucian Taylor in Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams (1907), this project reframes critical debates about abject materiality to address the environmental affordances of formlessness.

British India and Victorian Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India.The book traces the development of Anglo-Indian writing from its genesis in the 1820s and 1830s through the nineteenth century. Previously unstudied texts by women poets and travel-writers, members of the colonial administration and British and Indian contributors to the periodical press are examined alongside the well-known work of Rudyard Kipling and William Jones. Key events of Victorian India - the Indian Mutiny, the sati controversy, the rise of Bengal nationalism - are re-aligned within a dual literary and political context, emphasising the engagement of both colonizer and colonized writers with canonical British literature as well as their responses to their immediate surroundings. At the same time, the book explores the colonizers' enduring concern with their own representations of 'home'.The book argues that the colonial literature of British India demonstrates the existence of a distinct Anglo-Indian cultural community, self-defined against Britain as well as against its colonial surroundings, and at times open to the inclusion of Indian as well as British participants. In doing so, it transforms our current understanding of the literature of British India and its relationship to Victorian culture.

This book is one of a five-volume series, Victorian Material Culture (general editors Tatiana Kontou and Vicky Mills), designed to present primary source materials on aspects of Victorian culture. This volume (volume IV) focuses on manufactured things, including textiles (fabrics, clothing, paper, carpets etc.), metal goods (cutlery, pins, locks etc.), and household items (including ceramics, glassware, soap, candles etc.). The volume's editors, Wynne and Yates, offer detailed introductions to each section as well as an extensive introduction to the whole volume, which demonstrates the significance of manufacturing to the political, social and cultural environment of the Victorian period.

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

The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfast's intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science.

This dissertation analyzes the role of celebrity in determining the lives and literary productions of bestselling female authors in the nineteenth century. It identifies celebritydom as a compelling factor in a woman author's development of her literary persona, which affects both her public identity and the literature she produces in accord with that identity. By focusing on Dinah Mulock Craik, Florence Marryat, Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), and Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly) "Literary Sensations" considers how star status confers new opportunities and new challenges for women writers in the publicity spotlight. Examining works of published and unpublished fiction, essays, memoir, and stage entertainment alongside contemporary periodical reviews, personal interest stories, gossip, interviews, and author images, I explore how Victorian women writers come to view themselves as celebrities who both shape and are shaped by the various engagements with their publics. My project pays special attention to Craik, Marryat, Ouida, and Lyall to facilitate the larger argument that as celebrity authors women writers embodied a new position in public life in the Victorian period, with the ability to affect theirs and others' domestic and political existence augmented by innovations in journalism and print and media technology.

Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war, as in "the fight against Ebola." What I call the "martial metaphor" is so embedded in the discourses of medicine—and the disciplines that critique it—that we do not think twice about using this construction or about its bioethical implications, much less its origins. As the first cultural history of the martial metaphor, "Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture" shows how it gained cultural purchase throughout the nineteenth century to become the figure of speech so prevalent today. The thought of medicine as war didn't begin as a metaphor; it emerged from the material connections between the military and medicine. These material connections were reflected on and redeployed as a metaphor by such authors as Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad during the advent of medical modernity to become codified in everyday usage. Part I discusses how Shelley and Kingsley conflated the cholera epidemics of the first half of the nineteenth century with war in the context of pre-bacteriological theories of disease. Part II addresses the connections between empire, race, and germ theory in the second half of the nineteenth century as articulated through the writings of Stoker, Conan Doyle, and Conrad, where we see that the epistemological change to understanding disease as caused by living organisms challenged Britain's salubrious racial identity."Medicine Is War" accounts for the historical baggage in the language commonly used to articulate the encounter with disease. Scholars such as Pamela Gilbert and Laura Otis who have referenced the metaphor in the context of other investigations of how nineteenth literature dealt with biological anxieties mapped onto political ones and vice versa have not addressed the cultural work of the metaphor itself. By contrast, "Medicine is War" traces how the metaphor's history influenced its use in the Victorian era, revealing how literature occluded the military history of medical language and circulated the resulting metaphor in the public imaginary.

This article argues for the importance of restoring girls' aspirations and self-education to narratives of Victorian educational reform. Studies typically focus upon the efforts of professionals, politicians and campaigners in plotting the pioneering changes to girls' education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here it is contended that the success of these developments depended upon a new generation of girls with the confidence and ambition to take advantage of the new opportunities to sit examinations and attend university. To do this, the article excavates the neglected phenomenon of the manuscript magazine. It examines how young females used well-established periodicals to advertise their own amateur magazines. Inviting readers to contribute to their ventures, they constructed independent networks of collaborative cultural endeavour. Manuscript magazines, it will be suggested, need to be understood as part of a 'magazine culture' widely embraced by Victorian girls. To tease out the small but subtle ways in which magazine culture could enhance the aspirations of young women, the article focuses upon the extraordinary diary archives of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–95). The educational career of Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was an early student at Newnham College in the 1880s, exemplifies the impact which engagement in girlhood culture could engender and the significant role played by magazines, both professional and amateur, in this process. Understanding teenage responses to educational reforms requires a recalibration of our analytical lens to focus not upon grand narratives of feminist awakening but rather upon the small subjective shifts which typically underlay young females' decisions.

Charles Kingsley's Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face was first published in Fraser's Magazine in 1852, but was reissued in numerous book editions in the late-nineteenth century. Though often viewed as a novel depicting the religious controversies of the 1850s, Kingsley's depiction of the life and brutal death of a strong female figure from late antiquity also sheds light on the way in which the Victorians remodeled ancient histories to explore shifting gender roles at the fin de siècle. As the book gained in popularity towards the end of the century, it was reimagined in many different cultural forms. This article demonstrates how Kingsley's Hypatia became a global, multi-media fiction of antiquity, how it was revisioned and consumed in different written, visual and material forms (book illustrations, a play, painting and sculpture) and how this reimagining functioned within the gender politics of the 1880s and 90s. Kingsley's novel retained a strong hold on the late-Victorian imagination, I argue, because the perpetual restaging of Hypatia's story through different media facilitated the circulation of pressing fin-de-siècle debates about women's education, women's rights, and female consumerism.

Written by a team of eminent historians, these essays explore how ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as `civilisation', `domesticity', `conscience' and `improvement' to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world. After the Victorians is written in honour of the late Professor John Clive of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography to connnect the public and private lives of the generations who came after the Victorians.

Ken Russell's film Gothic (1986) dramatises one of the key foundational myths of nineteenth-century British literature: the night at the Villa Diodati when Mary Shelley allegedly had the initial idea for her novel Frankenstein (1818). While the film can be enjoyed as a costumed horror film, this article argues that it is in fact an intricate response to the heritage film genre and to heritage tourism within the cultural and political context of Britain in the 1980s. Russell's film subverts heritage film conventions and mobilises early film techniques and forms of entertainment from the late Victorian era to comment upon the recuperation of Victorian culture in the heritage industry of the 1980s. To make clear how the film achieves this, four key aspects are analysed: the parallels between the film's structure and a funhouse ride; the film's use of the tableau vivant; the film's engagement with nineteenth-century celebrity cults; and the film's representation of heritage tourism. Taken together, these elements introduce a complex reflexivity in the film that allows the attentive viewer to enjoy it on several levels at once, both as a heritage horror film and as a neo-Victorian critique of the cultural forces that seek to revive the Victorian in a contemporary context.

Revue en ligne : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/1451 ; International audience ; Le propos de ce recueil d'articles sur le paganisme à la fin de l'ère victorienne (1870-1901) est d'étudier les croyances et pratiques païennes telles qu'elles sont représentées dans l'art et la littérature du dernier quart du XIXe siècle, époque marquée par le développement d'une approche anthropologique des cultures et des rituels dits « primitifs ». À partir d'un corpus riche et varié, allant de la poésie au journalisme, de la peinture à la fiction, ce volume explore, sous un angle interdisciplinaire, la fascination croissante pour le paganisme qui s'exprime dans la littérature, les arts, la religion, les sciences et la politique au cours de cette période de transition. Le paganisme hellénique, romain, égyptien ou celtique que célèbrent les auteurs et les artistes étudiés ici n'est plus simplement l'apanage d'une élite culturelle ; il est aussi, plus profondément, l'expression d'une réaction à l'industrialisation, au matérialisme, au scientisme, et à la crise religieuse que traverse la Grande-Bretagne, et traduit la recherche souvent créative, parfois provocatrice, d'autres formes de croyance.

Revue en ligne : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/1451 ; International audience ; Le propos de ce recueil d'articles sur le paganisme à la fin de l'ère victorienne (1870-1901) est d'étudier les croyances et pratiques païennes telles qu'elles sont représentées dans l'art et la littérature du dernier quart du XIXe siècle, époque marquée par le développement d'une approche anthropologique des cultures et des rituels dits « primitifs ». À partir d'un corpus riche et varié, allant de la poésie au journalisme, de la peinture à la fiction, ce volume explore, sous un angle interdisciplinaire, la fascination croissante pour le paganisme qui s'exprime dans la littérature, les arts, la religion, les sciences et la politique au cours de cette période de transition. Le paganisme hellénique, romain, égyptien ou celtique que célèbrent les auteurs et les artistes étudiés ici n'est plus simplement l'apanage d'une élite culturelle ; il est aussi, plus profondément, l'expression d'une réaction à l'industrialisation, au matérialisme, au scientisme, et à la crise religieuse que traverse la Grande-Bretagne, et traduit la recherche souvent créative, parfois provocatrice, d'autres formes de croyance.

This paper shares Andersson's interest in exploring the 'backstage' of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made use of contemporary statistics and terms such as 'respectability' or 'vice'. For the Victorians these carried multiple meanings and cultural resonances, partially dependent on identities of class, gender, generation, Tory or Liberal political orientation, attitude to faith, and ethnicity. This meant that the complex nuances of understanding attached to activities sometimes labelled as unrespectable 'vices' such as drinking, sexual transgression and gambling could make them acceptable in a variety of cultural contexts despite the opposition of vociferous anti-'vice' groups. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of the potentiality of visual and digital resources for delving deeper into such issues.

AbstractReal Talk: Direct Discourse and the Victorian NovelbyAlexandra Irene DumontDoctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Kent Puckett, ChairThis dissertation proceeds from the idea that, although it is everywhere present and routinely discussed, we have nevertheless neglected to talk, thoroughly, about "talk" in the Victorian realist novel. It also proceeds from the idea that we have done this because it is precisely what such novels, and Victorian culture more generally, have taught us to do. Talk, I argue, both as a subject and a mode of novelistic representation, is cast as an other to the novel, one that is simultaneously alien to and containable within the realist text. As a verbal activity, talk suggests an orality that is quotidian and amorphous, a flow of words submerged in the social world that elicits it. This formlessness and sociality render talk an ideal figure for the vast, teeming "life" to which the realist novel refers, and whose heterogeneity is as much a model as a vexation for novelistic form. As a textual formation within the novel, I argue, talk as direct discourse functions as a "real fictional object": a place in which the language of the novel shifts from a mode of representation to an object thereof, and consequently becomes at once more and less "real." For authors like Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, and Henry James, such ambiguities provide a means of navigating realism's competing imperatives of extra-textual reference and aesthetic self-sufficiency. Talk's minor quality allows it to animate the novel's rhetoric even as that rhetoric disavows talk as mere chatter, gossip, or report. My focus on talk, then, is a way of getting at a larger and in many ways more elusive subject: Victorian realism and the critical discussions thereof. Though talk as dialect or idiolect has an important place in the critical history of realism, it has not been the defining marker of either the realist mode or the putative formal sophistication of the Victorian novel. I begin my project by considering the primacy accorded by novel theory to free indirect discourse, and suggest that literary criticism's obsession with this form stems in part from the parallels between free indirect discourse itself and the methodology of those who have theorized it. Conversely, I argue, direct discourse has been read as a mere starting point, from which narrative complexity evolves. Yet it is because, not in spite, of this basic or minor quality that talk is fundamental to the realist novel. I examine the function of these minor forms of talk and direct discourse in the didactic stories and political essays of Harriet Martineau, the aphoristic "parables" and omniscient narration of George Eliot, and the "impressionizing" fictions and all-consuming style of Henry James. I trace the ways that Victorian realism casts talk as a foil for its more totalizing forms, arguing that in centering itself around this vanishing, minor object, realism centers itself around an absence. It is not, then, the presence of the world in the text that makes the realist novel possible, but rather the world's absence that makes space for the novelistic real.