B.W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores ...
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The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.Less
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.
Simon Goldhill
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149844
- eISBN:
- 9781400840076
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book ...
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How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.Less
How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.
Simon Goldhill
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149844
- eISBN:
- 9781400840076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the ...
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This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the classical past. It raises new questions and new understandings in three major areas of scholarship: nineteenth-century studies, Classics, and the so-called Reception Studies. It examines the discipline of Classics and its place in Victorian culture, as well as some very strong challenges to the Classics as a story, which constitute a need for a major revision of the account. In particular, it considers the relationship between Classics and sexuality. It also discusses the most important revolution of the nineteenth century, and how this affects our understanding of a discipline as a discipline: the loss of the dominant place of Christianity in Victorian Britain.Less
This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the classical past. It raises new questions and new understandings in three major areas of scholarship: nineteenth-century studies, Classics, and the so-called Reception Studies. It examines the discipline of Classics and its place in Victorian culture, as well as some very strong challenges to the Classics as a story, which constitute a need for a major revision of the account. In particular, it considers the relationship between Classics and sexuality. It also discusses the most important revolution of the nineteenth century, and how this affects our understanding of a discipline as a discipline: the loss of the dominant place of Christianity in Victorian Britain.
Simon Goldhill
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149844
- eISBN:
- 9781400840076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire by focusing on the art of John William Waterhouse. It considers four ...
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This chapter examines how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire by focusing on the art of John William Waterhouse. It considers four of Waterhouse's paintings—Saint Eulalia, Mariamne, Hylas and the Nymph, and Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus—and shows that they are a paradigmatic site for reflecting on the complexity of the circulation of classical knowledge in Victorian culture—reception in action. It also explores how Waterhouse represents the male subject of desire, and how his representational devices position, manipulate, and implicate the viewer. The discussion places Waterhouse at the center of a Victorian worry about male self-control and erotic openness, and suggests that his case is an example of how one strategy of modern self-definition loves to oversimplify “the Victorians” as a contrastive other to today—and nowhere more obviously than in the field of sexuality.Less
This chapter examines how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire by focusing on the art of John William Waterhouse. It considers four of Waterhouse's paintings—Saint Eulalia, Mariamne, Hylas and the Nymph, and Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus—and shows that they are a paradigmatic site for reflecting on the complexity of the circulation of classical knowledge in Victorian culture—reception in action. It also explores how Waterhouse represents the male subject of desire, and how his representational devices position, manipulate, and implicate the viewer. The discussion places Waterhouse at the center of a Victorian worry about male self-control and erotic openness, and suggests that his case is an example of how one strategy of modern self-definition loves to oversimplify “the Victorians” as a contrastive other to today—and nowhere more obviously than in the field of sexuality.
Roslyn Jolly
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119852
- eISBN:
- 9780191671227
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119852.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes to history as a narrative model, tracing the development from his early interest in ‘scientific’ historiography to the radically anti-historical ...
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This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes to history as a narrative model, tracing the development from his early interest in ‘scientific’ historiography to the radically anti-historical character of his late works. James's use of the term ‘history’ was influenced by developments in nineteenth-century historiography, but was also embedded in the complex of defensive manœuvres through which Victorian culture sought to control its anxiety about the power of fiction. Reading James's novels in the light of contemporary debates about the morality and authorship and the politics of reading, the author finds that fiction develops from being history's censored ‘other’ in the early works to being a valued mode of problem-solving in the later fiction. This shift may be seen as the product of James's increasing engagement with the reading practices of groups marginalised by high Victorian culture: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde. The book ends with a consideration of the challenge posed to James's radical anti-historical epistemology by the unprecedented violence of twentieth-century history.Less
This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes to history as a narrative model, tracing the development from his early interest in ‘scientific’ historiography to the radically anti-historical character of his late works. James's use of the term ‘history’ was influenced by developments in nineteenth-century historiography, but was also embedded in the complex of defensive manœuvres through which Victorian culture sought to control its anxiety about the power of fiction. Reading James's novels in the light of contemporary debates about the morality and authorship and the politics of reading, the author finds that fiction develops from being history's censored ‘other’ in the early works to being a valued mode of problem-solving in the later fiction. This shift may be seen as the product of James's increasing engagement with the reading practices of groups marginalised by high Victorian culture: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde. The book ends with a consideration of the challenge posed to James's radical anti-historical epistemology by the unprecedented violence of twentieth-century history.
Mark Bevir
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691150833
- eISBN:
- 9781400840281
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691150833.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
This chapter explores Victorian culture using the concepts of tradition and dilemma to highlight both continuities and discontinuities. Continuities arose from the persistence of traditions from the ...
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This chapter explores Victorian culture using the concepts of tradition and dilemma to highlight both continuities and discontinuities. Continuities arose from the persistence of traditions from the late eighteenth century right through the late nineteenth century. Discontinuities arose as people responded to dilemmas in ways that transformed these traditions. More specifically, the dominant traditions in Victorian Britain were liberalism and evangelicalism, both of which had constitutive places in a wide range of domestic, social, political, and imperial practices. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, these two traditions confronted dilemmas such as the collapse of classical economics and the crisis of faith. People responded to these dilemmas in ways that decisively changed social practices, altering the manner of religious worship, inspiring a new trade unionism, and fragmenting the Liberal Party. The British socialist movement developed in the context of these changes, sometimes benefiting from them, sometimes contributing to them, and at other times struggling to respond to them.Less
This chapter explores Victorian culture using the concepts of tradition and dilemma to highlight both continuities and discontinuities. Continuities arose from the persistence of traditions from the late eighteenth century right through the late nineteenth century. Discontinuities arose as people responded to dilemmas in ways that transformed these traditions. More specifically, the dominant traditions in Victorian Britain were liberalism and evangelicalism, both of which had constitutive places in a wide range of domestic, social, political, and imperial practices. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, these two traditions confronted dilemmas such as the collapse of classical economics and the crisis of faith. People responded to these dilemmas in ways that decisively changed social practices, altering the manner of religious worship, inspiring a new trade unionism, and fragmenting the Liberal Party. The British socialist movement developed in the context of these changes, sometimes benefiting from them, sometimes contributing to them, and at other times struggling to respond to them.
Simon Goldhill
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149844
- eISBN:
- 9781400840076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter relates the historical fiction of early Christianity in the Roman Empire to the intellectual lives of their authors, and uses this to see something of the social network within which the ...
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This chapter relates the historical fiction of early Christianity in the Roman Empire to the intellectual lives of their authors, and uses this to see something of the social network within which the books emerged and to which they spoke. It first considers Victorian biography as a genre, showing that the Victorian recognition of the interweaving of a writer's life and work is part of the reception of the author as a cultural figure. To make this point, the chapter considers Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontö. It also examines the experience of historicity as a defining characteristic of Victorian culture by focusing on two major representative figures of the era: Charles Kingsley and Fred W. Farrar.Less
This chapter relates the historical fiction of early Christianity in the Roman Empire to the intellectual lives of their authors, and uses this to see something of the social network within which the books emerged and to which they spoke. It first considers Victorian biography as a genre, showing that the Victorian recognition of the interweaving of a writer's life and work is part of the reception of the author as a cultural figure. To make this point, the chapter considers Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontö. It also examines the experience of historicity as a defining characteristic of Victorian culture by focusing on two major representative figures of the era: Charles Kingsley and Fred W. Farrar.
Josephine Mcdonagh
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112853
- eISBN:
- 9780191670862
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112853.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
De Quincey finally died, after several efforts at predicting his death, on 8 December 1859 in the home which was procured by his children, and, for one who experienced living on social margins, he ...
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De Quincey finally died, after several efforts at predicting his death, on 8 December 1859 in the home which was procured by his children, and, for one who experienced living on social margins, he had a respectable and quiet death. In spite of how he had been recognized as an opium addict, he lived a relatively long life and died at the age of 74. Much of his work, however, tended to be neglected in some critical studies, as his works were viewed to be works of different kinds of knowledge instead of literary gems. Nonetheless, the variety and abundance of his work contributed greatly to the structure of Victorian society and culture, and his works serve as a commentary on how knowledge in a particular context was established during a particular time.Less
De Quincey finally died, after several efforts at predicting his death, on 8 December 1859 in the home which was procured by his children, and, for one who experienced living on social margins, he had a respectable and quiet death. In spite of how he had been recognized as an opium addict, he lived a relatively long life and died at the age of 74. Much of his work, however, tended to be neglected in some critical studies, as his works were viewed to be works of different kinds of knowledge instead of literary gems. Nonetheless, the variety and abundance of his work contributed greatly to the structure of Victorian society and culture, and his works serve as a commentary on how knowledge in a particular context was established during a particular time.
B. W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the importance of understanding the period immediately preceding the Victorian era for gaining a better understanding of Victorians. The ...
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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the importance of understanding the period immediately preceding the Victorian era for gaining a better understanding of Victorians. The organization of the book is then described, which begins with the contribution of an author born in the mid-1790s, namely Thomas Carlyle, and ending as the consciously Victorian generation began to die out in the 1930s.Less
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the importance of understanding the period immediately preceding the Victorian era for gaining a better understanding of Victorians. The organization of the book is then described, which begins with the contribution of an author born in the mid-1790s, namely Thomas Carlyle, and ending as the consciously Victorian generation began to die out in the 1930s.
Simon Goldhill
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149844
- eISBN:
- 9781400840076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines how Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's opera reforms responded to Victorian culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. Gluck was music ...
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This chapter examines how Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's opera reforms responded to Victorian culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. Gluck was music tutor to Marie Antoinette in Vienna and, after her marriage to Louis XVI, followed her to Paris, where he was a regular at Versailles. He died two years before the Revolution broke out. His music, according to Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, led to the shattering of the throne of France. The chapter considers formal elements of composition as well as frames of comprehension: the role of classicism in the critical understanding of theater; the role of dance in opera; the role of the chorus as a specifically classical element in modern opera. It also analyzes the differences between Vienna and Paris and London as sites for Gluck's operatic success and failure—within the incipient but self-conscious nationalism of the era.Less
This chapter examines how Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's opera reforms responded to Victorian culture to become the revolutionary icons his contemporaries believed them to be. Gluck was music tutor to Marie Antoinette in Vienna and, after her marriage to Louis XVI, followed her to Paris, where he was a regular at Versailles. He died two years before the Revolution broke out. His music, according to Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, led to the shattering of the throne of France. The chapter considers formal elements of composition as well as frames of comprehension: the role of classicism in the critical understanding of theater; the role of dance in opera; the role of the chorus as a specifically classical element in modern opera. It also analyzes the differences between Vienna and Paris and London as sites for Gluck's operatic success and failure—within the incipient but self-conscious nationalism of the era.
B. W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter explores Thomas Carlyle's fascination with the 18th century. It argues that Carlyle demonstrates a consistent response concerning the 18th century: a deep suspicion of its lack of ...
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This chapter explores Thomas Carlyle's fascination with the 18th century. It argues that Carlyle demonstrates a consistent response concerning the 18th century: a deep suspicion of its lack of heroism, either religious or political; its place as a historical rupture between the heroic age of the Reformation and the hollowness of modernity; the starkly contrasting roles played by France, Germany, and Britain in these developments; and the need for the prophet-historian to undo the secularizing worldliness of 18th-century philosophy if the soul of the 19th century were to be saved from this compromised inheritance. These themes are examined in relation to the monumental works he devoted early and late in his career to what he called the sceptical 18th century: The French Revolution and his History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858-65).Less
This chapter explores Thomas Carlyle's fascination with the 18th century. It argues that Carlyle demonstrates a consistent response concerning the 18th century: a deep suspicion of its lack of heroism, either religious or political; its place as a historical rupture between the heroic age of the Reformation and the hollowness of modernity; the starkly contrasting roles played by France, Germany, and Britain in these developments; and the need for the prophet-historian to undo the secularizing worldliness of 18th-century philosophy if the soul of the 19th century were to be saved from this compromised inheritance. These themes are examined in relation to the monumental works he devoted early and late in his career to what he called the sceptical 18th century: The French Revolution and his History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858-65).
Freda Harcourt
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719077531
- eISBN:
- 9781781700709
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719077531.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This chapter describes how four men of different religious views and temperaments, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Frederick W. Faber, and John Henry Newman, could define the Virgin Mary in ...
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This chapter describes how four men of different religious views and temperaments, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Frederick W. Faber, and John Henry Newman, could define the Virgin Mary in such a way that they could construct a masculine self-identity in opposition to, or in conjunction with, the woman they envisioned. Individually these men offer proof that, while religious differences allowed the Marian debates to occur, the debates would not have been possible without the Victorian preoccupation with defining either gender as distinct from the other. They and the other Victorians whose voices are heard in this chapter show us that a Virgin Mary who was a source of controversy reveals far more about Victorian culture than does the passive model of domesticity scholars have assumed her to be.Less
This chapter describes how four men of different religious views and temperaments, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Frederick W. Faber, and John Henry Newman, could define the Virgin Mary in such a way that they could construct a masculine self-identity in opposition to, or in conjunction with, the woman they envisioned. Individually these men offer proof that, while religious differences allowed the Marian debates to occur, the debates would not have been possible without the Victorian preoccupation with defining either gender as distinct from the other. They and the other Victorians whose voices are heard in this chapter show us that a Virgin Mary who was a source of controversy reveals far more about Victorian culture than does the passive model of domesticity scholars have assumed her to be.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310706
- eISBN:
- 9781846312762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846312762.001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This Introduction discusses a sensationalized ‘geography’ of Roman Catholicism constructed and widely circulated in Victorian culture. The territory of Catholic sensationalism can be seen in the ...
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This Introduction discusses a sensationalized ‘geography’ of Roman Catholicism constructed and widely circulated in Victorian culture. The territory of Catholic sensationalism can be seen in the secular and religious domains that comprised the nineteenth-century social experience. Because of sensationalism Victorians rewrote the well-known plots, characters, and motifs of Catholicism to explore gender, the body, artistic values, the workings of the mind and feelings. Victorian Catholicism in its sensationalized form can signify menacing difference but can also entertain stimulating alternatives to the norms of home culture. Victorian sensationalism provides scope for disrupting complacency about accepted norms in private and public life; challenges aesthetic standards by applying the techniques of mass literary culture to serious topics; and challenges social and cultural standards by savouring the terror hidden in mundane ‘normality’. Catholic sensationalism can be perceived as the fantastic expression of the Victorian cultural unconscious, the displacement of inexpressible contradictions, uncertainties and desires.Less
This Introduction discusses a sensationalized ‘geography’ of Roman Catholicism constructed and widely circulated in Victorian culture. The territory of Catholic sensationalism can be seen in the secular and religious domains that comprised the nineteenth-century social experience. Because of sensationalism Victorians rewrote the well-known plots, characters, and motifs of Catholicism to explore gender, the body, artistic values, the workings of the mind and feelings. Victorian Catholicism in its sensationalized form can signify menacing difference but can also entertain stimulating alternatives to the norms of home culture. Victorian sensationalism provides scope for disrupting complacency about accepted norms in private and public life; challenges aesthetic standards by applying the techniques of mass literary culture to serious topics; and challenges social and cultural standards by savouring the terror hidden in mundane ‘normality’. Catholic sensationalism can be perceived as the fantastic expression of the Victorian cultural unconscious, the displacement of inexpressible contradictions, uncertainties and desires.
Kathleen Blake
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199563265
- eISBN:
- 9780191721809
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199563265.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats ...
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This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of ‘new economic criticism,’ it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism and Victorian liberalism‐and‐imperialism. It challenges a high‐cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology‐critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith‐Benthamite; against the ‘carceral’ social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the ‘dismal science.’ But ‘utility’ has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favorable to freedom; and ‘leveling’ as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in work on Victorian literature‐and‐economics and Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through ‘liberal imperialism.’Less
This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of ‘new economic criticism,’ it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism and Victorian liberalism‐and‐imperialism. It challenges a high‐cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology‐critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith‐Benthamite; against the ‘carceral’ social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the ‘dismal science.’ But ‘utility’ has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favorable to freedom; and ‘leveling’ as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in work on Victorian literature‐and‐economics and Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through ‘liberal imperialism.’
Jude Piesse
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198752967
- eISBN:
- 9780191814433
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752967.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, American, 19th Century Literature
This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an ...
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This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. The first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres that featured within a range of mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of the book brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often drew upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations. It examines emigration texts featured in the Victorian feminist and women’s presses, Chartist anti-emigration literature, utopian emigration narratives, and a corpus of transnational westerns. Alongside its analysis of more ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of important works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. It also maps its analysis of settler emigration onto broader debates about Victorian literature and culture, Victorian empire, the global circulation of texts, periodical form, and the role of digitization within Victorian studies.Less
This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. The first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres that featured within a range of mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of the book brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often drew upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations. It examines emigration texts featured in the Victorian feminist and women’s presses, Chartist anti-emigration literature, utopian emigration narratives, and a corpus of transnational westerns. Alongside its analysis of more ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of important works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. It also maps its analysis of settler emigration onto broader debates about Victorian literature and culture, Victorian empire, the global circulation of texts, periodical form, and the role of digitization within Victorian studies.
Patrick Brantlinger
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450198
- eISBN:
- 9780801462634
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450198.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is the third in a trilogy of studies dealing with race and imperialism in British culture from about 1800 into the ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is the third in a trilogy of studies dealing with race and imperialism in British culture from about 1800 into the modern era. It focuses on various contradictions inherent in racist and imperialist ideology. It explores how various attitudes and ideas pertaining to race infused many aspects of British literature and culture between the 1830s and World War I. Above all, the ideologies of racism and imperialism were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from each other. Although it is widely acknowledged that the discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European, and colonial writing that deals with the slave trade and imperialist expansion, what is less often acknowledged is the extent to which racism informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is the third in a trilogy of studies dealing with race and imperialism in British culture from about 1800 into the modern era. It focuses on various contradictions inherent in racist and imperialist ideology. It explores how various attitudes and ideas pertaining to race infused many aspects of British literature and culture between the 1830s and World War I. Above all, the ideologies of racism and imperialism were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from each other. Although it is widely acknowledged that the discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European, and colonial writing that deals with the slave trade and imperialist expansion, what is less often acknowledged is the extent to which racism informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture.
Karen Shepherdson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474435734
- eISBN:
- 9781474453721
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435734.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson ...
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This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson examines commercial seaside photographic practice from 1860 to 1920, offering a visual exposition of the British seaside through the refracted lens of the itinerant beach photographer. Despite their humble means of production, the photographs discussed are frequently evocative, drawing the viewer into a nostalgic past shaped by visual half-truths. Photographic half-truths too readily can become amplified from a view to the view and to the experience. This chapter examines the conventions, expectations and mythologisation of what seaside portrait photography of this period should present, and how these inevitably provide a highly mediated view of the actual Victorian seaside experience.Less
This chapter provides insight into an overlooked form of demotic photography, revealing rich seams of imagery and offering fresh perspectives on Victorian coastal representations. Shepherdson examines commercial seaside photographic practice from 1860 to 1920, offering a visual exposition of the British seaside through the refracted lens of the itinerant beach photographer. Despite their humble means of production, the photographs discussed are frequently evocative, drawing the viewer into a nostalgic past shaped by visual half-truths. Photographic half-truths too readily can become amplified from a view to the view and to the experience. This chapter examines the conventions, expectations and mythologisation of what seaside portrait photography of this period should present, and how these inevitably provide a highly mediated view of the actual Victorian seaside experience.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804776080
- eISBN:
- 9780804778947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804776080.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Oscar Wilde's anti-athleticism. Though many critics cling to the popular image of Wilde as ludic martyr in a tragically unplayful age, his relationship with Victorian culture ...
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This chapter examines Oscar Wilde's anti-athleticism. Though many critics cling to the popular image of Wilde as ludic martyr in a tragically unplayful age, his relationship with Victorian culture was more complicated than that. What made him so controversial was his refusal to take play seriously or to show it the proper respect by competing with his fellow Victorians in the mandatory sport of modern life. Wilde considered earnestness a form of moral athleticism, the apotheosis of the competitive impulse: an ugly desire to win. He was a spoilsport, who refused to catch the ball or score a manly victory, enraging his fellow players and inviting the wrath of the world in play to rain down upon his head. In his courageous willingness to lose a game from which there is no escape, and thus to live forever in loss, Wilde discovered the art of love.Less
This chapter examines Oscar Wilde's anti-athleticism. Though many critics cling to the popular image of Wilde as ludic martyr in a tragically unplayful age, his relationship with Victorian culture was more complicated than that. What made him so controversial was his refusal to take play seriously or to show it the proper respect by competing with his fellow Victorians in the mandatory sport of modern life. Wilde considered earnestness a form of moral athleticism, the apotheosis of the competitive impulse: an ugly desire to win. He was a spoilsport, who refused to catch the ball or score a manly victory, enraging his fellow players and inviting the wrath of the world in play to rain down upon his head. In his courageous willingness to lose a game from which there is no escape, and thus to live forever in loss, Wilde discovered the art of love.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310706
- eISBN:
- 9781846312762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846312762.007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period, drawing attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular ...
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New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period, drawing attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular viewpoints and activities. Ideas have seized the imagination of men and women, whatever might be their truth or falsehood. The paradoxical contradictions related to Catholicism in its most sensational representations throw into sharp relief the many intellectual rifts and emotional tensions secreted in the lived experience of Victorian women and men. Catholic sensationalism provides new specificity and visibility to the imaginative ways in which Victorian culture attempted to enunciate its own inconsistencies.Less
New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period, drawing attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular viewpoints and activities. Ideas have seized the imagination of men and women, whatever might be their truth or falsehood. The paradoxical contradictions related to Catholicism in its most sensational representations throw into sharp relief the many intellectual rifts and emotional tensions secreted in the lived experience of Victorian women and men. Catholic sensationalism provides new specificity and visibility to the imaginative ways in which Victorian culture attempted to enunciate its own inconsistencies.
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226327327
- eISBN:
- 9780226327365
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226327365.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This book explains the concept of rigorous scientific “truth to nature” and the obvious charge of anxiety that coursed from Victorian moral culture. This concept is understood as a two-dimensional ...
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This book explains the concept of rigorous scientific “truth to nature” and the obvious charge of anxiety that coursed from Victorian moral culture. This concept is understood as a two-dimensional view of the Victorian intellectual scene and is named as “relativity.” Although the doctrine of relativity has always served undeclared political and philosophical agendas, the enigma of its influence remains as it is found to be full of flaws as an analytical method. The intensity of the general aversion toward relativistic thinking suggests that it springs from deeper and more obstinate sources than merely intellectual disagreement. The instance of Berlin brings into light the central element that is the “spectral” quality of relativism. The book discusses the intellectual history that aims to break down the impossible separation from one another of different fields of thought, and at the same time, to bridge the gaps dividing Victorian, modern, and postmodern.Less
This book explains the concept of rigorous scientific “truth to nature” and the obvious charge of anxiety that coursed from Victorian moral culture. This concept is understood as a two-dimensional view of the Victorian intellectual scene and is named as “relativity.” Although the doctrine of relativity has always served undeclared political and philosophical agendas, the enigma of its influence remains as it is found to be full of flaws as an analytical method. The intensity of the general aversion toward relativistic thinking suggests that it springs from deeper and more obstinate sources than merely intellectual disagreement. The instance of Berlin brings into light the central element that is the “spectral” quality of relativism. The book discusses the intellectual history that aims to break down the impossible separation from one another of different fields of thought, and at the same time, to bridge the gaps dividing Victorian, modern, and postmodern.
