Francis O’Gorman (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Victorian Britain offered the world an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism — currency, banking, ...
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Victorian Britain offered the world an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism — currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation — from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. This book is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. The chapters move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, this book sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the 19th century.Less
Victorian Britain offered the world an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism — currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation — from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. This book is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. The chapters move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, this book sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the 19th century.
Julia Straub
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199584628
- eISBN:
- 9780191739095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584628.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first ...
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In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first Victorian paintings depicting Dante's muse and reflects an obsession with Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, which is typical of the mid and late-Victorian reception of Dante. The Victorian Beatrice is usually associated with Pre-Raphaelite artworks, especially those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beatrices fit into either the category of the ‘beautiful dead woman’ or that of the male artist's cipher or projection screen. In contrast, the different Beatrices this chapter introduces possess a powerful and animate aura: they are alive, and the realm they inhabit is not so much a land of shadows, but the social environment of the Victorian here and now. The first part looks at her exploitation in Victorian literature, especially in the hands of John Ruskin, who saw Beatrice as a model for the behaviour of English women. In the second part, a critical response to such processes of idealization is discussed. George Eliot's Romola, a novel which consciously revises the use of a literary figure such as Beatrice, contains complex criticism of the kind of female idealization perpetuated by poetic traditions.Less
In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first Victorian paintings depicting Dante's muse and reflects an obsession with Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, which is typical of the mid and late-Victorian reception of Dante. The Victorian Beatrice is usually associated with Pre-Raphaelite artworks, especially those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beatrices fit into either the category of the ‘beautiful dead woman’ or that of the male artist's cipher or projection screen. In contrast, the different Beatrices this chapter introduces possess a powerful and animate aura: they are alive, and the realm they inhabit is not so much a land of shadows, but the social environment of the Victorian here and now. The first part looks at her exploitation in Victorian literature, especially in the hands of John Ruskin, who saw Beatrice as a model for the behaviour of English women. In the second part, a critical response to such processes of idealization is discussed. George Eliot's Romola, a novel which consciously revises the use of a literary figure such as Beatrice, contains complex criticism of the kind of female idealization perpetuated by poetic traditions.
Francis O’Gorman
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is about the connections between Victorian literature and the Victorian world of finance — its instruments, practices, theories, laws. The essays here explore relationships between the two ...
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This book is about the connections between Victorian literature and the Victorian world of finance — its instruments, practices, theories, laws. The essays here explore relationships between the two activities of high capitalism and Victorian literary imagining, and ponder their cross-over narratives, cognate forms of thought, and interrelationships of discourses. Prominent discussions of literature and economics in the Victorian period have explored the two fundamentals of traditional economic theory in relation to art and art theory. However, the present book looks, broadly, at capitalism in the Victorian period from other angles because it moves beyond relations of production/consumption to the more complex structures of 19th-century advanced capitalism in its historical moment.Less
This book is about the connections between Victorian literature and the Victorian world of finance — its instruments, practices, theories, laws. The essays here explore relationships between the two activities of high capitalism and Victorian literary imagining, and ponder their cross-over narratives, cognate forms of thought, and interrelationships of discourses. Prominent discussions of literature and economics in the Victorian period have explored the two fundamentals of traditional economic theory in relation to art and art theory. However, the present book looks, broadly, at capitalism in the Victorian period from other angles because it moves beyond relations of production/consumption to the more complex structures of 19th-century advanced capitalism in its historical moment.
Sos Eltis
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121831
- eISBN:
- 9780191671340
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121831.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Drama
This book challenges long-established views of Oscar Wilde as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional ...
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This book challenges long-established views of Oscar Wilde as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. By tracing Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, the book uncovers themes subsequently concealed in successive versions which demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist, and a feminist. Wilde borrowed plots and incidents from numerous contemporary French and English plays, but he then subtly rewrote his plagiarized material in order to mock the conventions he imitated. By analysing previously unconsidered manuscript drafts, and comparing the finished plays with their sources, the book displays a surprising depth and complexity in Wilde's work. The little-known early play, Vera; or, The Nihilists is revealed as a politically radical drama, the society plays are shown to challenge Victorian sexual and social mores, and The Importance of Being Earnest is interpreted as an anarchic farce, which reflects the Utopian vision of Wilde's political essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’.Less
This book challenges long-established views of Oscar Wilde as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. By tracing Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, the book uncovers themes subsequently concealed in successive versions which demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist, and a feminist. Wilde borrowed plots and incidents from numerous contemporary French and English plays, but he then subtly rewrote his plagiarized material in order to mock the conventions he imitated. By analysing previously unconsidered manuscript drafts, and comparing the finished plays with their sources, the book displays a surprising depth and complexity in Wilde's work. The little-known early play, Vera; or, The Nihilists is revealed as a politically radical drama, the society plays are shown to challenge Victorian sexual and social mores, and The Importance of Being Earnest is interpreted as an anarchic farce, which reflects the Utopian vision of Wilde's political essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’.
Robert Macfarlane
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199296507
- eISBN:
- 9780191711916
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296507.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of two theories of originality. It identifies two contrasting cultural narratives to explain literary creation. One is a hallowed vision of creation ...
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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of two theories of originality. It identifies two contrasting cultural narratives to explain literary creation. One is a hallowed vision of creation as generation — which may be called creatio — the other a more pragmatic account of creation as rearrangement, which might be called inventio. The former conventionally connotes some brief, noumenal moment of afflatus or inspiration, while the latter has the tang of the atelier about it. The primary objective of the book is presented.Less
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of two theories of originality. It identifies two contrasting cultural narratives to explain literary creation. One is a hallowed vision of creation as generation — which may be called creatio — the other a more pragmatic account of creation as rearrangement, which might be called inventio. The former conventionally connotes some brief, noumenal moment of afflatus or inspiration, while the latter has the tang of the atelier about it. The primary objective of the book is presented.
Nancy Henry
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter serves as a reminder that if finance was a ‘white, male, metropolitan, and middle-class’ discourse, then it was not uniformly so. Thinking specifically about matters of female influence ...
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This chapter serves as a reminder that if finance was a ‘white, male, metropolitan, and middle-class’ discourse, then it was not uniformly so. Thinking specifically about matters of female influence in the public world, it argues that one of the consequences of literary critics' preoccupation with censuring capitalism is the failure to consider those Victorian women who made the most of financial opportunities available to them; specifically, those who benefited from and helped develop what is called the ‘Victorian culture of investment’. The chapter looks at women in fiction and in real life who, if not running financial institutions, made a significant contribution by investing in business. They acquired, in turn, financial responsibility and power in what might easily seem a male world.Less
This chapter serves as a reminder that if finance was a ‘white, male, metropolitan, and middle-class’ discourse, then it was not uniformly so. Thinking specifically about matters of female influence in the public world, it argues that one of the consequences of literary critics' preoccupation with censuring capitalism is the failure to consider those Victorian women who made the most of financial opportunities available to them; specifically, those who benefited from and helped develop what is called the ‘Victorian culture of investment’. The chapter looks at women in fiction and in real life who, if not running financial institutions, made a significant contribution by investing in business. They acquired, in turn, financial responsibility and power in what might easily seem a male world.
Lucy Bending
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187172
- eISBN:
- 9780191674648
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187172.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter sets out the focus of this book, namely the arguments over the meaning and interpretation of pain as they appeared in many ...
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This introductory chapter sets out the focus of this book, namely the arguments over the meaning and interpretation of pain as they appeared in many different forms of literature — whether novels, medical textbooks, campaigning pamphlets, advertisements, or sermons — primarily in the last two decades of the 19th century. It traces the relationships between different understandings of physical pain by looking at the language and arguments of those who described it, and maps the changing perceptions of pain against specific medical, theological, anthropological, and technological developments.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the focus of this book, namely the arguments over the meaning and interpretation of pain as they appeared in many different forms of literature — whether novels, medical textbooks, campaigning pamphlets, advertisements, or sermons — primarily in the last two decades of the 19th century. It traces the relationships between different understandings of physical pain by looking at the language and arguments of those who described it, and maps the changing perceptions of pain against specific medical, theological, anthropological, and technological developments.
Miles Taylor
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198207290
- eISBN:
- 9780191717277
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207290.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This book tells the life of Ernest Jones from birth to death, with the aim of reconstituting a plausible account of his activities, speeches, and writings. It serves as a corrective to the wilder ...
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This book tells the life of Ernest Jones from birth to death, with the aim of reconstituting a plausible account of his activities, speeches, and writings. It serves as a corrective to the wilder things that Jones chose to tell about his life, and to some of the even wilder things that he suppressed. The book also gives an account of how Jones invented and retold his own life-story for political and literary effect, and in so doing achieved his only real success.Less
This book tells the life of Ernest Jones from birth to death, with the aim of reconstituting a plausible account of his activities, speeches, and writings. It serves as a corrective to the wilder things that Jones chose to tell about his life, and to some of the even wilder things that he suppressed. The book also gives an account of how Jones invented and retold his own life-story for political and literary effect, and in so doing achieved his only real success.
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.
Jerod Ra'Del Hollyfield
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474429948
- eISBN:
- 9781474453561
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474429948.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since ...
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This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.Less
This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719071447
- eISBN:
- 9781781701096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719071447.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the ...
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This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Lucy Bending
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187172
- eISBN:
- 9780191674648
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187172.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers ...
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It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers suffer alone, unable to translate their physical pains into words. This chapter looks into the arguments of those who promote this line of reasoning, most notably Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry, and refutes their claims both theoretically and by arguing from the rhetorical strategies of Victorian writers. The flaw in such arguments is that their proponents refuse to accept that pain can enter into language and be accommodated by its structures — whether descriptive or metaphorical — in the face of a paucity of directly expressive words for painful sensations. In response, the chapter schematizes the conventional attitudes towards physical pain, outside the realms of medicine and Christianity, that were open to the Victorian sufferer and writer.Less
It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers suffer alone, unable to translate their physical pains into words. This chapter looks into the arguments of those who promote this line of reasoning, most notably Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry, and refutes their claims both theoretically and by arguing from the rhetorical strategies of Victorian writers. The flaw in such arguments is that their proponents refuse to accept that pain can enter into language and be accommodated by its structures — whether descriptive or metaphorical — in the face of a paucity of directly expressive words for painful sensations. In response, the chapter schematizes the conventional attitudes towards physical pain, outside the realms of medicine and Christianity, that were open to the Victorian sufferer and writer.
Jane Moody
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Victorian drama and its dealings with risk and liability. Here, The Poor of New York is presented as a striking example of a wider issue: the dramatization of scenes from ...
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This chapter examines Victorian drama and its dealings with risk and liability. Here, The Poor of New York is presented as a striking example of a wider issue: the dramatization of scenes from advanced capitalism, particularly the transformation of financial danger into theatrical display, which occurred diversely on the Victorian stage. Analysing interwoven financial relationships, the chapter establishes the common elements of trust, illusion, and deceit that bound capital and drama together and which were knowingly exploited to produce what is called the ‘capitalist aesthetics of Victorian sensation culture’. The cultural form of 19th-century drama is uncannily like capital itself because it is ‘built on appearances, characterised by insoluble contradiction, and defined by extreme forms of distortion’: in the age of high capitalism, drama accordingly acquired a peculiar diagnostic power.Less
This chapter examines Victorian drama and its dealings with risk and liability. Here, The Poor of New York is presented as a striking example of a wider issue: the dramatization of scenes from advanced capitalism, particularly the transformation of financial danger into theatrical display, which occurred diversely on the Victorian stage. Analysing interwoven financial relationships, the chapter establishes the common elements of trust, illusion, and deceit that bound capital and drama together and which were knowingly exploited to produce what is called the ‘capitalist aesthetics of Victorian sensation culture’. The cultural form of 19th-century drama is uncannily like capital itself because it is ‘built on appearances, characterised by insoluble contradiction, and defined by extreme forms of distortion’: in the age of high capitalism, drama accordingly acquired a peculiar diagnostic power.
Francis O’Gorman
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores a set of finance-related divisions behind novelist Henry Rider Haggard's representations and proposes a fresh relationship between an aesthetic practice and the money markets. ...
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This chapter explores a set of finance-related divisions behind novelist Henry Rider Haggard's representations and proposes a fresh relationship between an aesthetic practice and the money markets. Heroes of romances often stand to acquire extensive fortunes, yet Haggard infrequently allows money to be their first motive or their noblest. Haggard's works are connected with another form of financial life in that his heroes are exceptional risk takers. They correspond in this respect with the financial adventurers about whom Haggard also wrote, the speculator and venture capitalist avant la lettre who was struggling to articulate his position at the end of the 19th century as a legitimate agent of economic progress. Plotting the profits of jeopardy, Haggard's fiction was in a more divided relationship with the conflictual discourses of the adventurer than his financial villains suggest. This chapter proposes that these divisions suggest a conflict in late Victorian understandings of speculation and its relation to economic progress itself.Less
This chapter explores a set of finance-related divisions behind novelist Henry Rider Haggard's representations and proposes a fresh relationship between an aesthetic practice and the money markets. Heroes of romances often stand to acquire extensive fortunes, yet Haggard infrequently allows money to be their first motive or their noblest. Haggard's works are connected with another form of financial life in that his heroes are exceptional risk takers. They correspond in this respect with the financial adventurers about whom Haggard also wrote, the speculator and venture capitalist avant la lettre who was struggling to articulate his position at the end of the 19th century as a legitimate agent of economic progress. Plotting the profits of jeopardy, Haggard's fiction was in a more divided relationship with the conflictual discourses of the adventurer than his financial villains suggest. This chapter proposes that these divisions suggest a conflict in late Victorian understandings of speculation and its relation to economic progress itself.
Nicholas Shrimpton
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Victorian literature's explicit response to money across the whole 19th century, focusing on the technical arguments about money as they figured in the modern world of Victorian ...
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This chapter examines Victorian literature's explicit response to money across the whole 19th century, focusing on the technical arguments about money as they figured in the modern world of Victorian finance. It also looks at the theological language often mobilized by literary writers in the earlier part of the period to understand the proper realm, the moral force, of wealth, and what ‘doing well’ might mean. It is a secular notion of money that this chapter perceives struggling to establish itself during the 19th century.Less
This chapter examines Victorian literature's explicit response to money across the whole 19th century, focusing on the technical arguments about money as they figured in the modern world of Victorian finance. It also looks at the theological language often mobilized by literary writers in the earlier part of the period to understand the proper realm, the moral force, of wealth, and what ‘doing well’ might mean. It is a secular notion of money that this chapter perceives struggling to establish itself during the 19th century.
Simon J. James
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199606597
- eISBN:
- 9780191738517
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199606597.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s ...
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H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man’s only alternative to self‐destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells’s late‐Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries—with consequences for the nature both of Wells’s writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late‐Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870–1 Education Acts. It considers Wells’s best‐known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono‐Bungay. It also examines less well‐known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon, and Wells’s journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells’s best‐selling book in his own lifetime.Less
H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man’s only alternative to self‐destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells’s late‐Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries—with consequences for the nature both of Wells’s writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late‐Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870–1 Education Acts. It considers Wells’s best‐known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono‐Bungay. It also examines less well‐known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon, and Wells’s journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells’s best‐selling book in his own lifetime.
Josephine M. Guy
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter returns to other tensions about financial value to make a forceful point about contemporary historians of culture. Oscar Wilde's relationship with capitalism was no simple matter of ...
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This chapter returns to other tensions about financial value to make a forceful point about contemporary historians of culture. Oscar Wilde's relationship with capitalism was no simple matter of privileging high art over the demands of bourgeois values. Wilde may have appeared to have revived a Romantic distaste for associating the aesthetic with the financial. But he was also, of course, a writer needing to shape his work to suit the requirements of the market in which he published. Using Wilde, this chapter contemplates the hidden assumption of some critics working on the publishing history of the fin de siecle that understanding the material environment of a writer's work is enough. It maintains that the contemporary scholar of publishing history must always recognise limits to what an increased knowledge of an author's dealings with the market reveals. Without such recognition, important matters about form, authorial intention, and literary value are left unanswered.Less
This chapter returns to other tensions about financial value to make a forceful point about contemporary historians of culture. Oscar Wilde's relationship with capitalism was no simple matter of privileging high art over the demands of bourgeois values. Wilde may have appeared to have revived a Romantic distaste for associating the aesthetic with the financial. But he was also, of course, a writer needing to shape his work to suit the requirements of the market in which he published. Using Wilde, this chapter contemplates the hidden assumption of some critics working on the publishing history of the fin de siecle that understanding the material environment of a writer's work is enough. It maintains that the contemporary scholar of publishing history must always recognise limits to what an increased knowledge of an author's dealings with the market reveals. Without such recognition, important matters about form, authorial intention, and literary value are left unanswered.
Catherine Seville
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199281923
- eISBN:
- 9780191712951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281923.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the involvement of one hugely successful mid-century writer, Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), in disputes about copyright, both national and international. For the first time, ...
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This chapter examines the involvement of one hugely successful mid-century writer, Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), in disputes about copyright, both national and international. For the first time, this chapter presents a detailed survey of the intersections between financial and literary forms of value in Lytton's legal dealings and public articulations of the nature of modern authorship, and maintains a sense of how these debates were echoed in Lytton's dramas.Less
This chapter examines the involvement of one hugely successful mid-century writer, Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), in disputes about copyright, both national and international. For the first time, this chapter presents a detailed survey of the intersections between financial and literary forms of value in Lytton's legal dealings and public articulations of the nature of modern authorship, and maintains a sense of how these debates were echoed in Lytton's dramas.
Krista Lysack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- October 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198836162
- eISBN:
- 9780191882418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198836162.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The introduction lays out the argument that what distinguished Victorian devotional literature was not a set of generic conventions but the experience of time, that is to say the form and feel of ...
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The introduction lays out the argument that what distinguished Victorian devotional literature was not a set of generic conventions but the experience of time, that is to say the form and feel of devotion’s reading durations. After identifying Victorian chronometrical print as a unique variety of devotional literature, the introduction goes on to explore the multi-scalar nature of the Victorian period with particular attention to industrial clock time and “empty time.” After discussing reading as a peculiarly temporal everyday practice, it goes on to note the affective nature of durational reading. By focusing on the operations of measured and felt time, the introduction makes a case for Victorian devotion as the uniquely material and affective observance of incremental time. After a brief discussion of the book’s relevance to recent critiques of the secularization thesis and to recent scholarship on the religious turn, the introduction closes with a brief summary of each of the book’s six chapters and with some speculations about the temporal affinities between conceptions of eternity and the quotidian.Less
The introduction lays out the argument that what distinguished Victorian devotional literature was not a set of generic conventions but the experience of time, that is to say the form and feel of devotion’s reading durations. After identifying Victorian chronometrical print as a unique variety of devotional literature, the introduction goes on to explore the multi-scalar nature of the Victorian period with particular attention to industrial clock time and “empty time.” After discussing reading as a peculiarly temporal everyday practice, it goes on to note the affective nature of durational reading. By focusing on the operations of measured and felt time, the introduction makes a case for Victorian devotion as the uniquely material and affective observance of incremental time. After a brief discussion of the book’s relevance to recent critiques of the secularization thesis and to recent scholarship on the religious turn, the introduction closes with a brief summary of each of the book’s six chapters and with some speculations about the temporal affinities between conceptions of eternity and the quotidian.
