B.W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores ...
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The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.Less
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers — Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James — to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.
John Wilson Foster
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232833
- eISBN:
- 9780191716454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232833.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on changes in society in the post-Victorian era as depicted in Irish novels. Topics covered include love and marriage, the changing frame of mind involving relations between men ...
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This chapter focuses on changes in society in the post-Victorian era as depicted in Irish novels. Topics covered include love and marriage, the changing frame of mind involving relations between men and women and the social representation of the male and female, and the competing ideas of Victorianism and modernity.Less
This chapter focuses on changes in society in the post-Victorian era as depicted in Irish novels. Topics covered include love and marriage, the changing frame of mind involving relations between men and women and the social representation of the male and female, and the competing ideas of Victorianism and modernity.
Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays ...
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Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays in this volume cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explaining why the author has been at the forefront of literary cultures. The contributors engage with topics including: the author cult which emerged shortly after her death; literary tourism in Haworth and Brussels; stage adaptations of her life and novels; her poetic legacy; the afterlives of her plots and characters in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the theatre and on the web. This book brings the story of Brontë’s legacy up-to-date, analysing texts such as obituaries, literary re-workings, adaptations for screen, vlogs, and erotic makeovers. The contributors take a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with Brontë, considering genre, narrative style, the representation of national and regional identities, sexuality and gender identity, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings.Less
Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays in this volume cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explaining why the author has been at the forefront of literary cultures. The contributors engage with topics including: the author cult which emerged shortly after her death; literary tourism in Haworth and Brussels; stage adaptations of her life and novels; her poetic legacy; the afterlives of her plots and characters in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the theatre and on the web. This book brings the story of Brontë’s legacy up-to-date, analysing texts such as obituaries, literary re-workings, adaptations for screen, vlogs, and erotic makeovers. The contributors take a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with Brontë, considering genre, narrative style, the representation of national and regional identities, sexuality and gender identity, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings.
Jonathan Wild
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748635061
- eISBN:
- 9781474419536
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635061.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian ...
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This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H. G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity. These ‘departments’ — war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, children's literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England — offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, this book offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.Less
This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H. G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity. These ‘departments’ — war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, children's literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England — offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, this book offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.
Adam Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198723271
- eISBN:
- 9780191789779
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723271.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
A study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic writing of key Romantic and Victorian author Walter Savage Landor. The main critical perspective deployed is a theorized ...
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A study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic writing of key Romantic and Victorian author Walter Savage Landor. The main critical perspective deployed is a theorized interrogation of notions of ‘cleanness’ and ‘contamination’ in the work, and by extension in poetry more generally. Cleanness, both in the sense of a neoclassical stylistic purity and of an individual moral and political probity, was centrally important to Walter Savage Landor’s writing, both in his prose and poetry. At the same time, this commitment to purity was contaminated in a variety of eloquent and complicating uncleannesses: his own fiery temper and frequent rages; his sometimes scurrilous and sexually explicit Latin poems; and the innovative, compacted, proto-modernist verse style of works such as his epic Gebir, as stylistically tangled and potent a poem ever produced in the Romantic era. An introductory chapter explores the conceptual, ethical and aesthetic valences of ‘cleanness’ in Landor’s writing, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry more generally; a second chapter rehearses Landor’s life and the ways it contaminates his writing; subsequent chapters work through his shorter lyric and blank-verse poems, his experiments in epic, his pastoral writing in prose and poetry, his neo-hellenic ‘idylls’, his verse dramas, and his novels. The final, longest chapter assesses his single largest textual production the Imaginary Conversations.Less
A study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic writing of key Romantic and Victorian author Walter Savage Landor. The main critical perspective deployed is a theorized interrogation of notions of ‘cleanness’ and ‘contamination’ in the work, and by extension in poetry more generally. Cleanness, both in the sense of a neoclassical stylistic purity and of an individual moral and political probity, was centrally important to Walter Savage Landor’s writing, both in his prose and poetry. At the same time, this commitment to purity was contaminated in a variety of eloquent and complicating uncleannesses: his own fiery temper and frequent rages; his sometimes scurrilous and sexually explicit Latin poems; and the innovative, compacted, proto-modernist verse style of works such as his epic Gebir, as stylistically tangled and potent a poem ever produced in the Romantic era. An introductory chapter explores the conceptual, ethical and aesthetic valences of ‘cleanness’ in Landor’s writing, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry more generally; a second chapter rehearses Landor’s life and the ways it contaminates his writing; subsequent chapters work through his shorter lyric and blank-verse poems, his experiments in epic, his pastoral writing in prose and poetry, his neo-hellenic ‘idylls’, his verse dramas, and his novels. The final, longest chapter assesses his single largest textual production the Imaginary Conversations.
Gage Averill
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195116724
- eISBN:
- 9780199849550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195116724.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Between 1925 and 1935, three significant sheet music books for barbershop quartets were published to further aid in establishing and publicizing barbershop quartets and barbershop arrangements: ...
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Between 1925 and 1935, three significant sheet music books for barbershop quartets were published to further aid in establishing and publicizing barbershop quartets and barbershop arrangements: Barber Shop Ballads, Close Harmony: Male Quartets, Ballads, and Funnies with Barber Shop Chord, and A Handbook for Adeline Addicts. The common thing about these books is that none of them accounted for the contributions of blacks to close harmony, they did not recognize some famous songs as having debuted as vaudeville quartets, and they regarded Tin Pan Alley songs as a commonwealth of only white Americans. Attention is also given to the idea of how amateurism plays a vital role in folk-music that is probably brought about by social change linked with neo-Victorianism. Soon after that however, barbershop harmonies were restored by the barbershop revival society.Less
Between 1925 and 1935, three significant sheet music books for barbershop quartets were published to further aid in establishing and publicizing barbershop quartets and barbershop arrangements: Barber Shop Ballads, Close Harmony: Male Quartets, Ballads, and Funnies with Barber Shop Chord, and A Handbook for Adeline Addicts. The common thing about these books is that none of them accounted for the contributions of blacks to close harmony, they did not recognize some famous songs as having debuted as vaudeville quartets, and they regarded Tin Pan Alley songs as a commonwealth of only white Americans. Attention is also given to the idea of how amateurism plays a vital role in folk-music that is probably brought about by social change linked with neo-Victorianism. Soon after that however, barbershop harmonies were restored by the barbershop revival society.
Nora Gilbert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804784207
- eISBN:
- 9780804784870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804784207.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the ...
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This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—it reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a “censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, the author explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.Less
This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—it reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a “censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, the author explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.
David E. Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272716
- eISBN:
- 9780823272761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272716.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Chapter 3 examines the political strategies white business owners and marketing agents employed in response to the black consumer activism of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beginning in 1893, white ...
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Chapter 3 examines the political strategies white business owners and marketing agents employed in response to the black consumer activism of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beginning in 1893, white authorities developed a Jim Crow strategy built around a defense of market values and public propriety, necessary regulations that they believed would prevent a wholesale disintegration of core capitalist principles and Victorian assumptions of respectability. In doing so, they attempted to make the segregation debate about political economy instead of race, castigating black consumer activism as a disruptive social act that threatened the popularity and financial growth of the region.Less
Chapter 3 examines the political strategies white business owners and marketing agents employed in response to the black consumer activism of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beginning in 1893, white authorities developed a Jim Crow strategy built around a defense of market values and public propriety, necessary regulations that they believed would prevent a wholesale disintegration of core capitalist principles and Victorian assumptions of respectability. In doing so, they attempted to make the segregation debate about political economy instead of race, castigating black consumer activism as a disruptive social act that threatened the popularity and financial growth of the region.
Alexandra Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail ...
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This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.Less
This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.
Jessica Cox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate ...
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This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.Less
This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.
Louisa Yates
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial ...
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This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.Less
This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.
Clifton Hood
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231172165
- eISBN:
- 9780231542951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172165.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed ...
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For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.Less
For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.
Jeffrey M. Brown
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781942954088
- eISBN:
- 9781786944122
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781942954088.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This essay discusses Virginia Woolf’s enduring fascination with the life of the acclaimed Victorian actor, Ellen Terry. Drawing principally on Woolf’s biographical writing on Terry—including both ...
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This essay discusses Virginia Woolf’s enduring fascination with the life of the acclaimed Victorian actor, Ellen Terry. Drawing principally on Woolf’s biographical writing on Terry—including both extant versions of her sole play, Freshwater, as well as a 1941 retrospective essay on Terry’s career—it argues that Woolf’s understanding of Terry pivots from a historical awareness of Terry’s position within the cultural and aesthetic divide between Victorianism and high modernism to a more challenging recognition of Terry’s persistent and ephemeral contemporaneity. In her reconceiving of Freshwater and her late essay, Woolf revises her own aesthetic ideals in order to show that Terry’s mode of acting provides an antidote to the ossification of value in the imprimaturs associated with modernist forms of celebrity.Less
This essay discusses Virginia Woolf’s enduring fascination with the life of the acclaimed Victorian actor, Ellen Terry. Drawing principally on Woolf’s biographical writing on Terry—including both extant versions of her sole play, Freshwater, as well as a 1941 retrospective essay on Terry’s career—it argues that Woolf’s understanding of Terry pivots from a historical awareness of Terry’s position within the cultural and aesthetic divide between Victorianism and high modernism to a more challenging recognition of Terry’s persistent and ephemeral contemporaneity. In her reconceiving of Freshwater and her late essay, Woolf revises her own aesthetic ideals in order to show that Terry’s mode of acting provides an antidote to the ossification of value in the imprimaturs associated with modernist forms of celebrity.
Emma Liggins
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719087561
- eISBN:
- 9781781706855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719087561.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The third chapter re-examines the spinster heroine of modernist fiction, focussing particularly on the widowed mother/repressed daughter and aunt/niece paradigms as examples of same-sex alliance and ...
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The third chapter re-examines the spinster heroine of modernist fiction, focussing particularly on the widowed mother/repressed daughter and aunt/niece paradigms as examples of same-sex alliance and rivalry. Showing the influence of psychoanalytical models of the family, the widowed mother in novels by May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor and Lettice Cooper is a monstrous presence from whom the daughter must separate, in order to make the transition from an out-dated Victorianism to an uncertain modernity. Aunt figures are haunting presences in the modernist text. In the work of lesser-known middlebrow novelist E.H. Young, the challenge to heterosexuality posed by the tantular, and the uses of fantasy, offer playful alternatives to spinster narratives structured around repression.Less
The third chapter re-examines the spinster heroine of modernist fiction, focussing particularly on the widowed mother/repressed daughter and aunt/niece paradigms as examples of same-sex alliance and rivalry. Showing the influence of psychoanalytical models of the family, the widowed mother in novels by May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor and Lettice Cooper is a monstrous presence from whom the daughter must separate, in order to make the transition from an out-dated Victorianism to an uncertain modernity. Aunt figures are haunting presences in the modernist text. In the work of lesser-known middlebrow novelist E.H. Young, the challenge to heterosexuality posed by the tantular, and the uses of fantasy, offer playful alternatives to spinster narratives structured around repression.
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231164702
- eISBN:
- 9780231538923
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231164702.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This epilogue explores some developments and directions in theater's engagement with evolution in the Anthropocene epoch. It shows that theater continues to interact with evolutionary ideas, and ...
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This epilogue explores some developments and directions in theater's engagement with evolution in the Anthropocene epoch. It shows that theater continues to interact with evolutionary ideas, and remains a valuable site in general for artistically and intellectually wrestling with scientific ideas through its intimacy, immediacy, and communality. Theater can engage the mind and senses in a way that is unique and that is becoming, if anything, more vital in a fragmented digital culture. In fact, recent plays that engage evolution are pretty bleak about where we have arrived as a species and where we are headed. Playwrights are depicting human evolution in varying degrees of crisis, regression, and stasis, with the added element of threat posed by climate change. This epilogue also considers retro-Victorianism in theater's engagement with evolutionary thought and how playwrights in the Anthropocene epoch tackle themes such as genetics and epigenetics, zooösis, mimicry, interspecies performance, and climate change. Finally, it discusses the idealization of “theater as a badge of the human achievement of co-operative culture”.Less
This epilogue explores some developments and directions in theater's engagement with evolution in the Anthropocene epoch. It shows that theater continues to interact with evolutionary ideas, and remains a valuable site in general for artistically and intellectually wrestling with scientific ideas through its intimacy, immediacy, and communality. Theater can engage the mind and senses in a way that is unique and that is becoming, if anything, more vital in a fragmented digital culture. In fact, recent plays that engage evolution are pretty bleak about where we have arrived as a species and where we are headed. Playwrights are depicting human evolution in varying degrees of crisis, regression, and stasis, with the added element of threat posed by climate change. This epilogue also considers retro-Victorianism in theater's engagement with evolutionary thought and how playwrights in the Anthropocene epoch tackle themes such as genetics and epigenetics, zooösis, mimicry, interspecies performance, and climate change. Finally, it discusses the idealization of “theater as a badge of the human achievement of co-operative culture”.
Josh McMullen
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199397860
- eISBN:
- 9780199397884
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199397860.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter argues that the call for “old-time religion” by big tent evangelists should not be understood as status anxiety, as fundamentalist doctrine, as small-town values, or as a call for a ...
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This chapter argues that the call for “old-time religion” by big tent evangelists should not be understood as status anxiety, as fundamentalist doctrine, as small-town values, or as a call for a renewed Christian America. Rather, big tent revivalism’s old-time religion was a critique of late Victorianism, not an attempt to retain Victorian culture. Big tent revivalists accused the late Victorian church of replacing old-time religion with a passionless substitute, which was only concerned with etiquette, dignity, and social status. Disappointed in what they viewed as the loss of spiritual intensity by liberals and conservatives alike, many evangelists longed for old-time religion’s passion and authenticity.Less
This chapter argues that the call for “old-time religion” by big tent evangelists should not be understood as status anxiety, as fundamentalist doctrine, as small-town values, or as a call for a renewed Christian America. Rather, big tent revivalism’s old-time religion was a critique of late Victorianism, not an attempt to retain Victorian culture. Big tent revivalists accused the late Victorian church of replacing old-time religion with a passionless substitute, which was only concerned with etiquette, dignity, and social status. Disappointed in what they viewed as the loss of spiritual intensity by liberals and conservatives alike, many evangelists longed for old-time religion’s passion and authenticity.
Josh McMullen
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199397860
- eISBN:
- 9780199397884
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199397860.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter puts forth the idea that while evangelists refused to abandon the language of moral commitment for therapeutic self-help, they embraced the larger impulses that these shifts represented: ...
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This chapter puts forth the idea that while evangelists refused to abandon the language of moral commitment for therapeutic self-help, they embraced the larger impulses that these shifts represented: the eagerness to avoid pain (both physical and mental), the rejection of suffering as the will of God, and the need and desire for immediate mental well-being. The revivalists’ emphasis on faith cures, divine healing, and miracles drew large crowds to revivalist meetings, aiding them in the effort of spreading Christianity’s message. In contrast to the Victorian values of self-control or moral fortitude, healing evangelists upheld religious experience as the hallmark of religious devotion, marking a shift away from those old values, and toward the nascent consumer society.Less
This chapter puts forth the idea that while evangelists refused to abandon the language of moral commitment for therapeutic self-help, they embraced the larger impulses that these shifts represented: the eagerness to avoid pain (both physical and mental), the rejection of suffering as the will of God, and the need and desire for immediate mental well-being. The revivalists’ emphasis on faith cures, divine healing, and miracles drew large crowds to revivalist meetings, aiding them in the effort of spreading Christianity’s message. In contrast to the Victorian values of self-control or moral fortitude, healing evangelists upheld religious experience as the hallmark of religious devotion, marking a shift away from those old values, and toward the nascent consumer society.
Lesley A. Hall
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199660513
- eISBN:
- 9780191799730
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660513.003.0008
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
The Victorians and their sexuality exert a hypnotic fascination over historians. In spite of historical revisionism, ‘Victorian’ remains a well-understood term for repressive attitudes, floating free ...
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The Victorians and their sexuality exert a hypnotic fascination over historians. In spite of historical revisionism, ‘Victorian’ remains a well-understood term for repressive attitudes, floating free from the chronological and geographical limits of Victoria’s actual reign. There have been distinctive shifts in the representation of Victorian sexuality. Initially, Victorianism represented the regime against which reformers were struggling. During the Sexual Revolution studies suggested seething lustful undercurrents beneath the respectable exteriors, and every few years a book appears which purports to reveal that the Victorians were just like ourselves in their enjoyment of sex. Are the Victorians a Rorschach test for changing contemporary ideas about sex and society, or does each generation create the Victorians it needs? The Victorians were numerous, and diverse, enough to provide a kaleidoscope of innumerable possibilities of sexual belief and behaviour and a well of contradictory stories.Less
The Victorians and their sexuality exert a hypnotic fascination over historians. In spite of historical revisionism, ‘Victorian’ remains a well-understood term for repressive attitudes, floating free from the chronological and geographical limits of Victoria’s actual reign. There have been distinctive shifts in the representation of Victorian sexuality. Initially, Victorianism represented the regime against which reformers were struggling. During the Sexual Revolution studies suggested seething lustful undercurrents beneath the respectable exteriors, and every few years a book appears which purports to reveal that the Victorians were just like ourselves in their enjoyment of sex. Are the Victorians a Rorschach test for changing contemporary ideas about sex and society, or does each generation create the Victorians it needs? The Victorians were numerous, and diverse, enough to provide a kaleidoscope of innumerable possibilities of sexual belief and behaviour and a well of contradictory stories.
Marc Napolitano
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199364824
- eISBN:
- 9780199364848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199364824.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
This chapter looks at the widely popular film adaptation of Oliver! directed by Carol Reed. This globally successful adaptation reinforced the musical’s influence on the general perception of Oliver ...
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This chapter looks at the widely popular film adaptation of Oliver! directed by Carol Reed. This globally successful adaptation reinforced the musical’s influence on the general perception of Oliver Twist, molding the cultural perception of the original novel in significant ways and shaping subsequent film and television adaptations, many of which chose to transform Dickens’s polemic into “family entertainment.” Though traditionalists decried this “Disneyfication” of Oliver Twist, the film version of Oliver! highlights the view of Victoriana in the postmodern era; Reed’s film emphasizes a “theme-park” style vision of Dickensian London that, though a simulacrum, is very much in keeping with the contemporary mass-cultural perception of Dickens’s era. The chapter concludes by assessing the influence of the film on subsequent revivals of the stage property, as the conventions of the contemporary “mega-musical” facilitated Cameron Mackintosh’s adaptation of Bart’s show into a cinematic “poperetta.”Less
This chapter looks at the widely popular film adaptation of Oliver! directed by Carol Reed. This globally successful adaptation reinforced the musical’s influence on the general perception of Oliver Twist, molding the cultural perception of the original novel in significant ways and shaping subsequent film and television adaptations, many of which chose to transform Dickens’s polemic into “family entertainment.” Though traditionalists decried this “Disneyfication” of Oliver Twist, the film version of Oliver! highlights the view of Victoriana in the postmodern era; Reed’s film emphasizes a “theme-park” style vision of Dickensian London that, though a simulacrum, is very much in keeping with the contemporary mass-cultural perception of Dickens’s era. The chapter concludes by assessing the influence of the film on subsequent revivals of the stage property, as the conventions of the contemporary “mega-musical” facilitated Cameron Mackintosh’s adaptation of Bart’s show into a cinematic “poperetta.”
Adam Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198723271
- eISBN:
- 9780191789779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723271.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter summarizes the thesis of the monograph as a whole. Landor’s poetry sets out to achieve a particular, neoclassical ‘purity’ of style, ...
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This chapter summarizes the thesis of the monograph as a whole. Landor’s poetry sets out to achieve a particular, neoclassical ‘purity’ of style, diction, form, and subject. But this poetic cleanness contains within it the symbolically fructifying contaminants that make Landor’s poetry more than simply emptily scrubbed exercises in draughtsmanship. The terms on which critics have sometimes engaged his poetry, as (for instance) elaborating a tension, or a debilitating mismatch, between form and substance are, it is claimed, actually features of this larger critical problematic. Landor is drawn to certain cleannesses, of style and form, of sexual continence and class responsibility, even as he understands, on some level, that perfect cleanness is a mode of nihilism.Less
This chapter summarizes the thesis of the monograph as a whole. Landor’s poetry sets out to achieve a particular, neoclassical ‘purity’ of style, diction, form, and subject. But this poetic cleanness contains within it the symbolically fructifying contaminants that make Landor’s poetry more than simply emptily scrubbed exercises in draughtsmanship. The terms on which critics have sometimes engaged his poetry, as (for instance) elaborating a tension, or a debilitating mismatch, between form and substance are, it is claimed, actually features of this larger critical problematic. Landor is drawn to certain cleannesses, of style and form, of sexual continence and class responsibility, even as he understands, on some level, that perfect cleanness is a mode of nihilism.
