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.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691192925
- eISBN:
- 9780691194219
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691192925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information ...
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What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information overload, big data, and the digital humanities. But as this book shows, these concerns are not new—they also mattered in the nineteenth century, as the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information. Exploring four key areas—reading, searching, counting, and testing—in which nineteenth-century British and American literary practices engaged developing information technologies, the book delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, it presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the nineteenth century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways. The book illuminates today's debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.Less
What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information overload, big data, and the digital humanities. But as this book shows, these concerns are not new—they also mattered in the nineteenth century, as the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information. Exploring four key areas—reading, searching, counting, and testing—in which nineteenth-century British and American literary practices engaged developing information technologies, the book delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, it presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the nineteenth century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways. The book illuminates today's debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.
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.
Daniel Hack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196930
- eISBN:
- 9781400883745
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196930.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the ...
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Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.Less
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Helen Small
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184911
- eISBN:
- 9780191674396
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184911.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical ...
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This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as insights into the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. This book traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. This study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel.Less
This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as insights into the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. This book traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. This study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel.
Sally Shuttleworth
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582563
- eISBN:
- 9780191702327
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582563.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What is the difference between a lie and a fantasy, when the subject is a child? Moving between literary and scientific texts, this book explores the range of fascinating issues that emerge when the ...
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What is the difference between a lie and a fantasy, when the subject is a child? Moving between literary and scientific texts, this book explores the range of fascinating issues that emerge when the inner world of the child becomes, for the first time, the explicit focus of literary and medical attention. Starting in the 1840s, which saw the publication of explorations of child development by Brontë and Dickens, as well as some of the first psychiatric studies of childhood, this book progresses through post-Darwinian considerations of the child's relations to the animal kingdom, to chart the rise of the Child Study Movement of the 1890s. The book offers detailed readings of novels by Dickens, Meredith, James, Hardy, and others, as well as the first overview of the early histories of child psychology and psychiatry. Chapters cover issues such as fears and night terrors, imaginary lands, the precocious child, child sexuality and adolescence, and the relationship between child and monkey. Experiments on babies, the first baby shows, and domestic monkey keeping also feature. Many of our current concerns with reference to childhood are shown to have their parallels in the Victorian age: from the pressures of school examinations, or the problems of adolescence, through to the disturbing issue of child suicide. Childhood, from this period, took on new importance as holding the key to the adult mind.Less
What is the difference between a lie and a fantasy, when the subject is a child? Moving between literary and scientific texts, this book explores the range of fascinating issues that emerge when the inner world of the child becomes, for the first time, the explicit focus of literary and medical attention. Starting in the 1840s, which saw the publication of explorations of child development by Brontë and Dickens, as well as some of the first psychiatric studies of childhood, this book progresses through post-Darwinian considerations of the child's relations to the animal kingdom, to chart the rise of the Child Study Movement of the 1890s. The book offers detailed readings of novels by Dickens, Meredith, James, Hardy, and others, as well as the first overview of the early histories of child psychology and psychiatry. Chapters cover issues such as fears and night terrors, imaginary lands, the precocious child, child sexuality and adolescence, and the relationship between child and monkey. Experiments on babies, the first baby shows, and domestic monkey keeping also feature. Many of our current concerns with reference to childhood are shown to have their parallels in the Victorian age: from the pressures of school examinations, or the problems of adolescence, through to the disturbing issue of child suicide. Childhood, from this period, took on new importance as holding the key to the adult mind.
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.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible ...
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This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.Less
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.
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.
