Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.
The volume consists of 15 papers discussing a vast array of issues and aspects relating to the concept of cultural memory. Taking as a standpoint the Halbwachs/Assman critical tradition, the individual contributions trace the relevance of the concept in the context of a wide range of areas, from medieval studies, through Victorian culture.
1 Rolling Out: Introduction -- 2 Theorising Sporting Masculinities -- 3 The Gentlemen's Club: Cycling and Masculinity in Victorian Britain -- 4 'Don't be soft': Cycling and Masculinity in the Twenty-First Century -- 5 Joining the Peloton: The Cult(ure) of Competitive Road Cycling -- 6 Getting Back on the Bike: Debating Injury and Masculinity -- 7 Winning at All Costs: The Intersects of Doping, Hypercompetition and Masculinity in Cycling -- 8 Out in the Peloton: Sexual Minorities in Road Cycling -- 9 Women on Wheels: Orthodox Masculinity and the Marginalisation of Women in Competitive Cycling -- 10 Crossing the Finish Line: Conclusions.
Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction -- Historical Coordinates: Medicine, Mobility, and Their Entanglements in Nineteenth-Century Britain -- Theoretical Cornerstones: Mobility Studies and the Medical Humanities -- Dissecting Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Contributions -- Works Cited -- Part I: Travel and Health -- Chapter 2: Doctors' Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century -- The Ocean as a Health Resort -- A Doctor's Narrative: Francis Workman -- Life On-Board the Sobraon: Passenger Narratives -- Ship Newspapers -- The Arrival of the Invalids -- Conclusion: Slow Travel for Health -- Works Cited -- Chapter 3: Watering Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel -- Bathing -- Spas and Seaside Resorts -- The Novel -- Conclusion: Spa Novels and Sedentarism -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Chapter 4: Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Movements of Travellers and Dancers -- Ailing and Itinerant Bodies as Liminal Spaces of Health -- Maternity, Mobility, and Mortality -- Conclusion: Victorian Heroines' Health and Travel -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Chapter 5: (Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age -- Mary Shelley and (Mental) Health -- Taking a Rest? Dickens and Collins -- Gissing's Brooding -- Conclusion: Resting Minds in Idly Moving Bodies -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Part II: Pathologising Mobilities -- Chapter 6: Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss -- Masculine Variations of Body Movements: Tom's Correct Posture.
1. Introduction: Screening Serial Murder: Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture; (Claire O'Callaghan and Sarah E Fanning).-Section I. Re-viewing Victims: Sex, Gender and Spectacle -- 2. Re-membering "The Five": Violence, Victims and the Dead Female Body in Neo-Victorian Portrayals of the Whitechapel Murders (Claire O'Callaghan) -- 3. 'It is happening again': Seriality, Twin Peaks and the Necroaesthetic (Chase Bucklew) -- 4. The Diminished Figure of the Serial Killer in A Confession: (Louise Wattis) -- 5. Serial Killer 'monster' woman (?): Aileen Wuornos on Trial and on Screen (Jo Aldridge) -- Section II. Psycho Paths: Re-Creating the Scenes of Crim -- 5. Wolf Creek, Mick Taylor and Australian Horror (Penny Spirou) -- 6. A Strange Sort of Comfort: Domestic Architecture, Home-Bodies, and the Nostalgia of Suburban Containment in American Serial Killer Narratives (Brenda S Gardenour Walter) -- 7. "Be Careful of Uncle Charlie: The Unsuspecting Serial Killer in Shadow of a Doubt" (Douglas MacLeod) -- 8. See No Evil: Representations of the Moors Murder Case (Ian Cummins, Marian Foley & Martin King) -- Section III. Monstrous Makeovers -- 9. The Sexualisation of Serial Killers in Twenty-First Century Film and the #MeToo Movement (Katrina Jan) -- 10. The 'Prison Poet' on Screen: Jack Unterweger and the Art of Murder (Michael Fuchs) -- 11. "Homicidal Hams" and "Psycho Clowns": Serial Killer Humor in TV Sitcoms and Sketch Comedies (David Scott Diffrient) -- 12. 'Jazz Hands and Strangulation': Serial Killers in Musicals (Louise Creechan) -- Section IV. 'Based on': Truth, Authenticity and the Politics of Representation -- 13. Graze Culture and Serial Murder: Brushing up against 'familiar monsters' in the wake of 9/11 (Adam Lynes & Craig Kelly) -- 14. 'We're here for something else': Mindhunter, Serial Murder and the Reverential (Rachael Collins & Michele Byers) -- 15. 'What follows is based on actual case files': Adapting the "Truth" in David Fincher's Zodiac (Sarah E Fanning). .
This book examines mid-Victorian discourse on the expansion of the British Empire's role in the Middle East. It investigates how British political leaders, journalists and the general public responded to events in the Ottoman Empire, which many, if not most, people in Britain came to see as trudging towards inevitable chaos and destruction. Although this 'Eastern Question' on a post-Ottoman future was ostensibly a matter of international politics and sometimes conflict, this study argues that the ideas underpinning it were conceived, shaped, and enforced according to domestic British attitudes. In this way, this book presents the Eastern Question as as much a British question as one related in any way to the Ottoman Empire. Particularly in the crucial decade of the 1870s, debates in Victorian society on the Eastern Question served as proxies for other pressing issues of the day, including electoral reform, changing religious attitudes, public education, and the costs of maintaining Britain's empire. This book offers new perspectives on the Eastern Question's relationship to these trends in Victorian society, culture, and politics, highlighting its significance in understanding Britain's imperial programme more widely in the second half of the nineteenth century
From Victorian breakthroughs in synthesising pigments to the BBC's conversion to chromatic broadcasting, the story of colour's technological development is inseparable from wider processes of modernisation that transformed Britain. This revolutionary history brings to light how new colour technologies informed ideas about national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialisation, decolonisation of the Empire and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation. Offering a compelling new account of modern British visual culture that reveals colour to be central to its aesthetic trajectories and political formations, this chromatic lens deepens our understanding of how British art is made and what it means, offering a new way to assess the visual landscape of the period and interpret its colourful objects. Across a kaleidoscopic array of materials, from radiant paintings by major Victorian artists, vivid print advertisements and vibrant interwar fashion photographs, to glorious Technicolor films and the prismatic programmes of the BBC's early years of colour television, The Rainbow's Gravity reveals how Britain modernised colour and how colour, in turn, modernised Britain
A must-read for anyone interested in the history of drag performance. -âPublishers WeeklyA rich and provocative history of drag's importance in modern British culture. Drag: A British History is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture-drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage
Modern Murders is the first comprehensive study of murder representations during the turn of the century, drawing on previously neglected archival material to explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic contexts of the period.Most studies view the abundance of murder representations throughout the nineteenth century as an indicator of a supposedly typical Victorian appetite for sensation and melodrama. Modern Murders, however, demonstrates the turn of the century's backlash against melodramatic and sensational representations of murder and reads them as an important component in the struggles for better aesthetic standards in art and entertainment, and as a dominant feature in the debates on mass culture. Through a plethora of visual and written texts, representations of fictional and actual "real life" murders, and "high" and "popular" forms of writing, the volume considers the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste, in the context of the democratization of culture.This book will be of value to scholars and graduate students in a variety of research areas, as well as general readers interested in the role of murder as a central trope in modern art and culture
"How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years? Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, the concept of race purification through eugenics arose in Victorian England and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today, suffusing our language and culture and echoing uneasily in discussions of modern gene editing techniques. In Control, Adam Rutherford presents "a remarkable combination of intelligence, knowledge, insight and admirable political passion, on a serious moral problem in contemporary society." (Carlo Rovelli). With disarming wit and scientific precision, he traces its intellectual origins and confronts the recurring question of whether eugenics could actually work. Control explains why eugenics remains so tempting to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control, and the scientific impossibility of doing so"--
"Faith in Markets demonstrates how religiously motivated choices shaped market activity, as well as the market itself, through the creation of Christian Business Enterprises (CBEs) in the early decades of nineteenth-century America. Slaughter focuses on the ways theologically conservative Protestants infused their businesses with faith and in turn, how these businesses shaped American capitalism and culture. Three CBEs of the American early national period form the core of Faith in Markets: George Rapp & Associates (the Harmony Society of Western Pennsylvania/Southern Indiana), the Pioneer Stage Coach Line (upstate New York), and Harper & Brothers (New York City). These businesses reflect the most influential Christian theologies of early America: Pietism, Calvinism, and Arminianism. Each of the manuscript's three parts is built around one of these cases. Part I focuses on how Lutheran Pietists attempted to purify the market, and in so doing provided an alternate vision of communal capitalism. Part II explores how evangelical Presbyterians strove to reform the market, not through legislation or volunteerism, but through business enterprise. Finally, part III examines how urban Methodists produced cultural objects (books!) that nudged American culture toward a middle-class, Victorian ideal, all while building a business that others regarded as the model of trustworthiness in a new era of anonymous market exchange"--