The purpose of this book is to analyse how marginality is experienced by ́the Other ́ (women, orphans, children, labourers) in Victorian literature and how these individuals succeed in transgressing borders or attempt at doing this. The Other uses many strategies to climb the social ladder and to preserve a certain social position: marrying into a superior social class, subverting the master ́s position and usurping him, acquiring education and knowledge to become superior, tempting the master into passionate love affairs, approaching interpersonal communication, or staying true to one ́s own self, defending ones moral values, accepting lessons of domesticity, becoming an ́angel in the house ́, travelling to unknown territories, exchanging reality for fictional worlds, and so on. On their way of achieving their goals, the Others are shown in different spaces which contribute to the construction of their identity. Our survey unfolds the complexity of the marginalization experience of the Victorian Others, their individual or collective mentality and their agency. Drawing on Otherness from six Victorian novels, our book takes an interpretative approach. The analysis of spaces revealed how the positionality of women or orphans or labourers in social hierarchies of gender, race and legal status influences and even affects their legitimacy or access to a superior position. Their agency has not always overcome their marginalization embedded within the structure of society, but at least temporarily and gradually it has improved the women ́s living conditions by being rewarded with a beautiful family or by earning a living thus eluding the dependency on a man. By contextualizing the six novels into the Victorian Age, our survey will hopefully contribute to the understanding of women and of their attempts at emancipation by demonstrating how their positionality impacts their agency and their personality.

Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The 'Most Dreadful Visitation.' This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings--and fears--of mental degeneracy.An Open Access edition of this work is available on the OAPEN Library.

“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth-century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities. The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning, chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside full colour maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.