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.
Daniel Hack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196930
- eISBN:
- 9781400883745
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196930.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African ...
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This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.Less
This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.
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’.
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.
Daniel Hack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196930
- eISBN:
- 9781400883745
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196930.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the ...
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Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.Less
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.
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.
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.
Daniel Hack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196930
- eISBN:
- 9781400883745
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196930.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement ...
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This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, the chapter suggests that Victorian literature is Chesnutt's quarry: both source and prey. Here, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.Less
This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, the chapter suggests that Victorian literature is Chesnutt's quarry: both source and prey. Here, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.
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.
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.
Jesse Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196640
- eISBN:
- 9781400883738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196640.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if ...
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This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.Less
This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.
Kevin A. Morrison
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474431538
- eISBN:
- 9781474445023
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431538.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory. It seeks to transform understanding of Victorian liberalism’s key ...
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Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory. It seeks to transform understanding of Victorian liberalism’s key conceptual metaphor: that the mind of an individuated subject is private space. Focusing on the environments inhabited by four Victorian writers and intellectuals, it delineates how the commitment of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Robert Browning liberalism was shaped by or manifested through the physical spaces in which they worked. The book also asserts the centrality of the embodied experience of actual people to Victorian political thought. Readers will gain new historical and literary understanding and will be introduced to an innovative methodology that links material culture and political theory.Less
Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory. It seeks to transform understanding of Victorian liberalism’s key conceptual metaphor: that the mind of an individuated subject is private space. Focusing on the environments inhabited by four Victorian writers and intellectuals, it delineates how the commitment of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Robert Browning liberalism was shaped by or manifested through the physical spaces in which they worked. The book also asserts the centrality of the embodied experience of actual people to Victorian political thought. Readers will gain new historical and literary understanding and will be introduced to an innovative methodology that links material culture and political theory.
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.
Jennifer Mitchell
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780813066677
- eISBN:
- 9780813058863
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813066677.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist ...
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Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist moment, and are expressly mourned in post-modern texts. In particular, the literary works discussed all challenge the more popular term “sadomasochism” as a conglomerate form of perversion that was named and studied in the late nineteenth century. Underscoring close textual analyses with modern theories of masochism as empowering, this book argues that Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853), George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) all experiment with masochistic relationships that extend far beyond reductive early readings of inherently feminine or sexually aberrant masochism. Ordinary Masochisms begins with a historical and theoretical examination of masochism’s treatment during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries before moving to an examination of the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which masochism garners its name. An intermediary chapter treats Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1903) as a case study transitioning between sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the conclusion about Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) addresses masochism’s seeming inability to recuperate itself from categories of deviance, despite the success of contemporary popular culture representations. The book closes with a brief consideration of masochistic reading, a subtle undercurrent of the project as a whole.Less
Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist moment, and are expressly mourned in post-modern texts. In particular, the literary works discussed all challenge the more popular term “sadomasochism” as a conglomerate form of perversion that was named and studied in the late nineteenth century. Underscoring close textual analyses with modern theories of masochism as empowering, this book argues that Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853), George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) all experiment with masochistic relationships that extend far beyond reductive early readings of inherently feminine or sexually aberrant masochism. Ordinary Masochisms begins with a historical and theoretical examination of masochism’s treatment during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries before moving to an examination of the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which masochism garners its name. An intermediary chapter treats Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1903) as a case study transitioning between sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the conclusion about Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) addresses masochism’s seeming inability to recuperate itself from categories of deviance, despite the success of contemporary popular culture representations. The book closes with a brief consideration of masochistic reading, a subtle undercurrent of the project as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
