Robert Mighall
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262182
- eISBN:
- 9780191698835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic ...
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This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic writing—from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic ‘returned’ at the so-called fin de siècle. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th century, through the ‘Urban Gothic’ fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the ‘Suburban Gothic’ of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.Less
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic writing—from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic ‘returned’ at the so-called fin de siècle. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th century, through the ‘Urban Gothic’ fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the ‘Suburban Gothic’ of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks ...
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This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.Less
This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199257928
- eISBN:
- 9780191594854
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257928.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to ...
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That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist. This book contends that Dickens's popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. The book describes the ways in which he envisioned and engineered his cultural pervasiveness, the media that enabled it, and the posthumous processes — technological, commercial, ideological, and emotional — that have perpetuated it. The first part examines Dickens's cultural vision and practice — his model of authorship, his journalism, his public readings, his relationship with America and the machine — and the second part explores Dickens's screen and ‘heritage’ afterlives, as well as the Dickens visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’. Dickens's one‐time presence on the ten‐pound note symbolizes the book's guiding interest in the relationship between the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens's populist vision and legacy. The book argues that the aspects of Dickens's art that have underscored critical ambivalence about Dickens — his relationship with money, mechanical reproduction, and the mass market in particular — have ultimately ensured both his iconic cultural status and his centrality to the academic canon.Less
That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist. This book contends that Dickens's popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. The book describes the ways in which he envisioned and engineered his cultural pervasiveness, the media that enabled it, and the posthumous processes — technological, commercial, ideological, and emotional — that have perpetuated it. The first part examines Dickens's cultural vision and practice — his model of authorship, his journalism, his public readings, his relationship with America and the machine — and the second part explores Dickens's screen and ‘heritage’ afterlives, as well as the Dickens visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’. Dickens's one‐time presence on the ten‐pound note symbolizes the book's guiding interest in the relationship between the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens's populist vision and legacy. The book argues that the aspects of Dickens's art that have underscored critical ambivalence about Dickens — his relationship with money, mechanical reproduction, and the mass market in particular — have ultimately ensured both his iconic cultural status and his centrality to the academic canon.
Caroline Levine
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160627
- eISBN:
- 9781400852604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160627.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter begins with an investigation of encounters between unified wholes and networked connections, a set of relations that has been absolutely fundamental to cultural studies, from early ...
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This chapter begins with an investigation of encounters between unified wholes and networked connections, a set of relations that has been absolutely fundamental to cultural studies, from early twentieth-century anthropology to recent scholarship on global flows. It then turns to the overlapping of multiple networks, which is a far more ordinary fact of social life—and a more unsettled and unsettling one—than literary and cultural studies has recognized. It develops an understanding of networked form through two readings. The first Trish Loughran's study of print culture in early America, The Republic in Print, which makes the case that multiple, overlapping networks—mail, print, money, and roads—interrupted each other and frustrated the work of consolidating a new nation. The second is Charles Dickens's Bleak House, a novel that casts social relations as a complex heaping of networks that not only stretch across space but also unfold over time.Less
This chapter begins with an investigation of encounters between unified wholes and networked connections, a set of relations that has been absolutely fundamental to cultural studies, from early twentieth-century anthropology to recent scholarship on global flows. It then turns to the overlapping of multiple networks, which is a far more ordinary fact of social life—and a more unsettled and unsettling one—than literary and cultural studies has recognized. It develops an understanding of networked form through two readings. The first Trish Loughran's study of print culture in early America, The Republic in Print, which makes the case that multiple, overlapping networks—mail, print, money, and roads—interrupted each other and frustrated the work of consolidating a new nation. The second is Charles Dickens's Bleak House, a novel that casts social relations as a complex heaping of networks that not only stretch across space but also unfold over time.
Nicholas P. Money
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195172270
- eISBN:
- 9780199790258
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195172270.003.0008
- Subject:
- Biology, Microbiology
This chapter considers other fungi that grow in buildings. Meruliporia incrassata has become a frequent problem in California, where its massive rootlike organs, called rhizomorphs, snake into homes ...
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This chapter considers other fungi that grow in buildings. Meruliporia incrassata has become a frequent problem in California, where its massive rootlike organs, called rhizomorphs, snake into homes and destroy their timber frames. Serpula lacrymans causes dry rot in Europe and has plagued buildings and wooden ships for hundreds of years. Samuel Pepys was exasperated by the effects of dry rot on the Royal Navy in the 17th century, and Thomas Faraday sought a “cure” for this fungus in the 19th century. Dry rot appeared in the writings of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe, and is also mentioned in Leviticus. A microbial menace, called the artillery fungus, that uses a miniature cannon to shoot its black spore-filled balls onto new food sources is described. This extraordinary feat of biomechanics causes this fungus to spatter itself onto automobiles, serving as yet another fungal stimulus for lawsuits.Less
This chapter considers other fungi that grow in buildings. Meruliporia incrassata has become a frequent problem in California, where its massive rootlike organs, called rhizomorphs, snake into homes and destroy their timber frames. Serpula lacrymans causes dry rot in Europe and has plagued buildings and wooden ships for hundreds of years. Samuel Pepys was exasperated by the effects of dry rot on the Royal Navy in the 17th century, and Thomas Faraday sought a “cure” for this fungus in the 19th century. Dry rot appeared in the writings of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe, and is also mentioned in Leviticus. A microbial menace, called the artillery fungus, that uses a miniature cannon to shoot its black spore-filled balls onto new food sources is described. This extraordinary feat of biomechanics causes this fungus to spatter itself onto automobiles, serving as yet another fungal stimulus for lawsuits.
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390322
- eISBN:
- 9780199776207
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390322.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter investigates the influence of the slave narrative in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-61). Dickens read Douglass’ 1845 slave narrative and devoted an entire chapter of his 1842 ...
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This chapter investigates the influence of the slave narrative in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-61). Dickens read Douglass’ 1845 slave narrative and devoted an entire chapter of his 1842 travelogue, American Notes, to the atrocities of American slavery. Written on the eve of the American Civil War, Great Expectations appears a steadfastly national text, advocating prison reform and chronicling English class divisions. Yet its organization around scenes of incarceration, clandestine reading, violence, and illicit escape resonate with events across the Atlantic and point to the preeminence of the fugitive plot. Resituating the slave narrative in England, Dickens applies its generic paradigm to issues of class mobility, literacy, and freedom, ultimately mounting a plea for gradual reform over violent insurrection.Less
This chapter investigates the influence of the slave narrative in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-61). Dickens read Douglass’ 1845 slave narrative and devoted an entire chapter of his 1842 travelogue, American Notes, to the atrocities of American slavery. Written on the eve of the American Civil War, Great Expectations appears a steadfastly national text, advocating prison reform and chronicling English class divisions. Yet its organization around scenes of incarceration, clandestine reading, violence, and illicit escape resonate with events across the Atlantic and point to the preeminence of the fugitive plot. Resituating the slave narrative in England, Dickens applies its generic paradigm to issues of class mobility, literacy, and freedom, ultimately mounting a plea for gradual reform over violent insurrection.
Diane Mason
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719077142
- eISBN:
- 9781781701089
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719077142.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book provides a reading of both fictional and medical writings concerned with auto-erotic sexuality in the long nineteenth century. It examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by ...
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This book provides a reading of both fictional and medical writings concerned with auto-erotic sexuality in the long nineteenth century. It examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by influential English, Continental and American practitioners such as J. H. Kellogg, E. B. Foote, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and R. V. Pierce, as well as a number of anonymously authored texts popular in the period. The book demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on the underworld literatures of Victorian pornography but also in the creation of well-known characters by authors now regarded as canonical including Dean Farrar, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. It is not merely a consideration of the male masturbator however: it presents a study of the largely overlooked literature on female masturbation in both clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader, as well as in fiction. The book concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of ‘Victorian Dad’, a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.Less
This book provides a reading of both fictional and medical writings concerned with auto-erotic sexuality in the long nineteenth century. It examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by influential English, Continental and American practitioners such as J. H. Kellogg, E. B. Foote, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and R. V. Pierce, as well as a number of anonymously authored texts popular in the period. The book demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on the underworld literatures of Victorian pornography but also in the creation of well-known characters by authors now regarded as canonical including Dean Farrar, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. It is not merely a consideration of the male masturbator however: it presents a study of the largely overlooked literature on female masturbation in both clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader, as well as in fiction. The book concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of ‘Victorian Dad’, a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.
MICHAEL SLATER
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263938
- eISBN:
- 9780191734236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263938.003.0018
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Kathleen Tillotson served as a member of the Council of the British Academy from 1968 to 1971, and as Vice-President from 1968 to 1969. Her work with John Butt on the Clarendon Dickens proceeded ...
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Kathleen Tillotson served as a member of the Council of the British Academy from 1968 to 1971, and as Vice-President from 1968 to 1969. Her work with John Butt on the Clarendon Dickens proceeded steadily from the late 1950s onwards. Their grand project was to establish a critical text of each novel, ‘free from the numerous corruptions that disfigure modern reprints’, and with an apparatus of variants that should record Dickens' progressive revision of the text, ‘accompanied by all such assistance as Dickens himself supplied in the shape of prefaces, descriptive headlines, illustrations and cover designs from the wrappers of the monthly part-issues, which often foreshadow the drift of the novel as Dickens originally conceived it’. The first volume in the series, Oliver Twist, appeared in late 1965. The other great scholarly enterprise with which Tillotson's name will be forever associated is the Pilgrim Edition (from Volume 8, called The British Academy Pilgrim Edition) of Dickens' letters.Less
Kathleen Tillotson served as a member of the Council of the British Academy from 1968 to 1971, and as Vice-President from 1968 to 1969. Her work with John Butt on the Clarendon Dickens proceeded steadily from the late 1950s onwards. Their grand project was to establish a critical text of each novel, ‘free from the numerous corruptions that disfigure modern reprints’, and with an apparatus of variants that should record Dickens' progressive revision of the text, ‘accompanied by all such assistance as Dickens himself supplied in the shape of prefaces, descriptive headlines, illustrations and cover designs from the wrappers of the monthly part-issues, which often foreshadow the drift of the novel as Dickens originally conceived it’. The first volume in the series, Oliver Twist, appeared in late 1965. The other great scholarly enterprise with which Tillotson's name will be forever associated is the Pilgrim Edition (from Volume 8, called The British Academy Pilgrim Edition) of Dickens' letters.
Karin E. Gedge
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195130201
- eISBN:
- 9780199835157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195130200.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
European travelers to the early republic published numerous accounts that often expressed alarm and dismay at the reciprocal devotion of women and ministers, seeing in it a threat to families, ...
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European travelers to the early republic published numerous accounts that often expressed alarm and dismay at the reciprocal devotion of women and ministers, seeing in it a threat to families, churches, and the republic itself. Whether conservative or liberal, skeptical or approving of the democratic experiment and the disestablished church, writers as varied as Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Francis Grund, Charles Dickens, and Frances Wright felt compelled to describe the pastoral relationship and often did so in derogatory ways. It served as synecdoche and bellwether for the health of the republic.Less
European travelers to the early republic published numerous accounts that often expressed alarm and dismay at the reciprocal devotion of women and ministers, seeing in it a threat to families, churches, and the republic itself. Whether conservative or liberal, skeptical or approving of the democratic experiment and the disestablished church, writers as varied as Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Francis Grund, Charles Dickens, and Frances Wright felt compelled to describe the pastoral relationship and often did so in derogatory ways. It served as synecdoche and bellwether for the health of the republic.
Rachel Bowlby
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199607945
- eISBN:
- 9780191760518
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199607945.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go untold. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of ...
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Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go untold. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of childhood, it is just a background. In reality, parenthood has quite distinctive stories of desire and grief, anxiety and hatred embodied in the foundlings of abandonment and the ‘seeklings’ of parental longing. In recent decades, too, far-reaching changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (through reproductive technologies) have engendered new stories and questions. Why do people want (or not want, or want not) to be parents? How has the ‘choice’ first enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? The first half of the book looks at the implications of changing modes of biological parenthood and pre-parenthood (through reproductive technologies); at the multiplication of new parental parts and some older divisions; and at various historical antecedents to contemporary ways of thinking about parenthood, from choice to surrogacy. The second half then discovers a more complex history to the literary representation of parents and parenthood than may at first appear. It looks at how parental stories in literature may be present but obscured by the louder forms of love that claim the reader's first attention, and traces stories of parenthood back through well-known works (by Euripides, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Moore, and Edith Wharton). These stories have taken many forms, through diverse and paradigmatic orientations to parenthood: rejection, acceptance, or (sometimes all-encompassing) desire; with their corresponding responses in abandonment, recognition, adoption, or just plain ‘having’ children.Less
Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go untold. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of childhood, it is just a background. In reality, parenthood has quite distinctive stories of desire and grief, anxiety and hatred embodied in the foundlings of abandonment and the ‘seeklings’ of parental longing. In recent decades, too, far-reaching changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (through reproductive technologies) have engendered new stories and questions. Why do people want (or not want, or want not) to be parents? How has the ‘choice’ first enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? The first half of the book looks at the implications of changing modes of biological parenthood and pre-parenthood (through reproductive technologies); at the multiplication of new parental parts and some older divisions; and at various historical antecedents to contemporary ways of thinking about parenthood, from choice to surrogacy. The second half then discovers a more complex history to the literary representation of parents and parenthood than may at first appear. It looks at how parental stories in literature may be present but obscured by the louder forms of love that claim the reader's first attention, and traces stories of parenthood back through well-known works (by Euripides, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Moore, and Edith Wharton). These stories have taken many forms, through diverse and paradigmatic orientations to parenthood: rejection, acceptance, or (sometimes all-encompassing) desire; with their corresponding responses in abandonment, recognition, adoption, or just plain ‘having’ children.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and ...
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This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?Less
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474420983
- eISBN:
- 9781474453738
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420983.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale ...
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Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?Less
Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?
Tom Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199280780
- eISBN:
- 9780191712890
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280780.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This concluding chapter briefly explores the longer, forward-looking perspectives within which this book is situated. It looks at Jonson's presence in the theatre after 1832, in the figures of W. C. ...
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This concluding chapter briefly explores the longer, forward-looking perspectives within which this book is situated. It looks at Jonson's presence in the theatre after 1832, in the figures of W. C. Macready and Charles Dickens; it thinks about Leigh Hunt's importance as a later anthologist and perceptive critic of Jonson's dramatic and non-dramatic writing; and about the enormous influence of Gifford's edition of Jonson's Works, many times reprinted, and not wholly replaced until the final volume of the Oxford Jonson, edited by Herford and the Simpsons, was published in 1952. The chapter also wonders again about the emotional energies of Coleridge's engagement with Jonson, and reflects on how criticism ought to be open to Romantic allusion, and to Jonson's importance for the period.Less
This concluding chapter briefly explores the longer, forward-looking perspectives within which this book is situated. It looks at Jonson's presence in the theatre after 1832, in the figures of W. C. Macready and Charles Dickens; it thinks about Leigh Hunt's importance as a later anthologist and perceptive critic of Jonson's dramatic and non-dramatic writing; and about the enormous influence of Gifford's edition of Jonson's Works, many times reprinted, and not wholly replaced until the final volume of the Oxford Jonson, edited by Herford and the Simpsons, was published in 1952. The chapter also wonders again about the emotional energies of Coleridge's engagement with Jonson, and reflects on how criticism ought to be open to Romantic allusion, and to Jonson's importance for the period.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198184614
- eISBN:
- 9780191714214
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184614.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's ...
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This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's writing and, in so doing, to pinpoint some of the contradictions that are endemic in the current state of understanding of his art. This book locates the rationale for Dickens's ‘ostension’ in his populism and his belief that ‘dramatic’ forms of entertainment best serve the purposes of cultural inclusivity. It is structured around melodramatic models of villainy that are passionally defined. This typology is a heuristic device rather than a rigid system of categorisation. Much Dickens criticism still seems to belong to either the post-structuralist or the mimetic school — one tending to stress the self-reflexive fictionality of Dickens's texts, and the other tending to treat the novels as representations of social and/or psychological realities.Less
This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's writing and, in so doing, to pinpoint some of the contradictions that are endemic in the current state of understanding of his art. This book locates the rationale for Dickens's ‘ostension’ in his populism and his belief that ‘dramatic’ forms of entertainment best serve the purposes of cultural inclusivity. It is structured around melodramatic models of villainy that are passionally defined. This typology is a heuristic device rather than a rigid system of categorisation. Much Dickens criticism still seems to belong to either the post-structuralist or the mimetic school — one tending to stress the self-reflexive fictionality of Dickens's texts, and the other tending to treat the novels as representations of social and/or psychological realities.
Neil Corcoran
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198186908
- eISBN:
- 9780191719011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186908.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on Bowen's last, problematical novel, Eva Trout, which has polarized critical opinion. It explains this opinion and reasons for it, then proposes a new reading of it as the ...
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This chapter focuses on Bowen's last, problematical novel, Eva Trout, which has polarized critical opinion. It explains this opinion and reasons for it, then proposes a new reading of it as the climax in an altogether novel structure of Bowen's interest in the figures of mother and child. In the novel's eponymous heroine, Bowen articulates a representation of that impossible figure — the mother who has no child. A radically unsettling experimental fiction, this novel disfigures various figurations in the earlier work in a process of anamorphosis likened to some photographic distortions. In addition, such figures of authority in the earlier work as Henry James are, in this novel, replaced with an extensive consideration of Dickens, as novelist of childhood and writer of the grotesque. Finally, the chapter considers the metanarrative element of the novel, including its engagement with the forms and metaphysics of traditional Christianity.Less
This chapter focuses on Bowen's last, problematical novel, Eva Trout, which has polarized critical opinion. It explains this opinion and reasons for it, then proposes a new reading of it as the climax in an altogether novel structure of Bowen's interest in the figures of mother and child. In the novel's eponymous heroine, Bowen articulates a representation of that impossible figure — the mother who has no child. A radically unsettling experimental fiction, this novel disfigures various figurations in the earlier work in a process of anamorphosis likened to some photographic distortions. In addition, such figures of authority in the earlier work as Henry James are, in this novel, replaced with an extensive consideration of Dickens, as novelist of childhood and writer of the grotesque. Finally, the chapter considers the metanarrative element of the novel, including its engagement with the forms and metaphysics of traditional Christianity.
Kathryn M. Grossman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199642953
- eISBN:
- 9780191739231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199642953.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, ...
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Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, the text explores the question of violence in the service of revolutionary ideals, thereby completing Hugo’s lifelong reflections on the sublime and the grotesque. Three generations fight for their divergent visions of the nation’s past, present, and future in the exotic, unchartered terrain of north-west France. But Hugo’s play on space and time contains not just a political but also a personal element. The poet’s intertextual dialogue with his celebrated British counterparts now includes his Victorian contemporary, Charles Dickens, as well. The novel’s reply to A Tale of Two Cities provides insights into Hugo’s singular conception of the role of poetry in shaping his narrative and the future French republic alikeLess
Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, the text explores the question of violence in the service of revolutionary ideals, thereby completing Hugo’s lifelong reflections on the sublime and the grotesque. Three generations fight for their divergent visions of the nation’s past, present, and future in the exotic, unchartered terrain of north-west France. But Hugo’s play on space and time contains not just a political but also a personal element. The poet’s intertextual dialogue with his celebrated British counterparts now includes his Victorian contemporary, Charles Dickens, as well. The novel’s reply to A Tale of Two Cities provides insights into Hugo’s singular conception of the role of poetry in shaping his narrative and the future French republic alike
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the ...
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Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies; and the spread of language and ideas. Communicative attempts such as these permeate Dombey, the novel in which characters struggle to hear and through which Dickens struggles to be heard. Dombey famously and ambiguously invokes the arrival of the railway at the same time as Dickens's serialized form faces competition from new forms of railway reading, shilling novels selling for the same price as a single Dombey installment. Amidst this changing scene and under the influence of ideas Charles Babbage discussed in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Dickens examines the complications involved in trafficking bodies, transferring capital, and establishing contact.Less
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies; and the spread of language and ideas. Communicative attempts such as these permeate Dombey, the novel in which characters struggle to hear and through which Dickens struggles to be heard. Dombey famously and ambiguously invokes the arrival of the railway at the same time as Dickens's serialized form faces competition from new forms of railway reading, shilling novels selling for the same price as a single Dombey installment. Amidst this changing scene and under the influence of ideas Charles Babbage discussed in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Dickens examines the complications involved in trafficking bodies, transferring capital, and establishing contact.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for ...
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This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of nationality, professionalism, and the body. These ongoing battles over sound were concretely as well as conceptually territorial. Even as those opposed proclaimed as their principal goal the removal of music from the streets throughout the City and West London, including Belgravia, Kensington, and Chelsea, they endeavored to maintain clear boundaries in three main interrelated and at times overlapping areas: first, defending the purity of English national identity and culture against the taint of foreign infiltration; second, upholding economic and social divisions between the lower classes and middle-class professionals; and third, protecting the frail, afflicted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music. The chapter considers the verbal and visual responses of large numbers of Londoners, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, to the strains of a powerful threat.Less
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of nationality, professionalism, and the body. These ongoing battles over sound were concretely as well as conceptually territorial. Even as those opposed proclaimed as their principal goal the removal of music from the streets throughout the City and West London, including Belgravia, Kensington, and Chelsea, they endeavored to maintain clear boundaries in three main interrelated and at times overlapping areas: first, defending the purity of English national identity and culture against the taint of foreign infiltration; second, upholding economic and social divisions between the lower classes and middle-class professionals; and third, protecting the frail, afflicted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music. The chapter considers the verbal and visual responses of large numbers of Londoners, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, to the strains of a powerful threat.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199257928
- eISBN:
- 9780191594854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257928.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The Conclusion analyses the larger implications of the debate surrounding the opening of the commercial visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’ in Chatham, Kent, in 2007. It argues that the site ...
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The Conclusion analyses the larger implications of the debate surrounding the opening of the commercial visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’ in Chatham, Kent, in 2007. It argues that the site represents a challenge to the process of familiarization and ‘heritagization’ that has accompanied Dickens's rise to respectability and diminished his ability to empower ‘the people’ in the sense of those outside the cultural elite. Disparaging comparisons between Dickens World and Disney stem partly from a prevailing distrust in the modern era of the ‘culture industry’ — but also to the perceived Americanization of Dickens. The chapter argues that Dickens World reverses of the dissociation of Dickens from materialism that has accompanied his rise to ‘English iconhood’ in the public imagination. Moreover, if ancestry and heritage involve an idea of value residing in veneration, in an emotional relationship between the past and the present which is nonetheless hierarchical, then the accessibility, materialism and indeed playfulness of Dickens World break the bonds of ancestry. It arguably had to do so if it wanted to play to the lowbrow end of the spectrum in today's segregated cultural marketplace; its success or failure will thus tell us a great deal about whether or not Dickens's inclusive vision for the amusements of the people is still viable in the twenty‐first century, and about whether Dickens continues to amuse the people.Less
The Conclusion analyses the larger implications of the debate surrounding the opening of the commercial visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’ in Chatham, Kent, in 2007. It argues that the site represents a challenge to the process of familiarization and ‘heritagization’ that has accompanied Dickens's rise to respectability and diminished his ability to empower ‘the people’ in the sense of those outside the cultural elite. Disparaging comparisons between Dickens World and Disney stem partly from a prevailing distrust in the modern era of the ‘culture industry’ — but also to the perceived Americanization of Dickens. The chapter argues that Dickens World reverses of the dissociation of Dickens from materialism that has accompanied his rise to ‘English iconhood’ in the public imagination. Moreover, if ancestry and heritage involve an idea of value residing in veneration, in an emotional relationship between the past and the present which is nonetheless hierarchical, then the accessibility, materialism and indeed playfulness of Dickens World break the bonds of ancestry. It arguably had to do so if it wanted to play to the lowbrow end of the spectrum in today's segregated cultural marketplace; its success or failure will thus tell us a great deal about whether or not Dickens's inclusive vision for the amusements of the people is still viable in the twenty‐first century, and about whether Dickens continues to amuse the people.
Holly Furneaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199566099
- eISBN:
- 9780191721915
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566099.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents ...
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This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses, and explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his career‐long commitment to articulating homoerotic desire. This book places Dickens's writing in a wider literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer‐Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life‐writing, journalism, legal, and political debates, the book proposes that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it argues that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes into current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of histories of the family and of sexuality; it makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life‐affirming trajectory in queer theory.Less
This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses, and explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his career‐long commitment to articulating homoerotic desire. This book places Dickens's writing in a wider literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer‐Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life‐writing, journalism, legal, and political debates, the book proposes that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it argues that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes into current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of histories of the family and of sexuality; it makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life‐affirming trajectory in queer theory.
