A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London. At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day. As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet. In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.

"Yields up all sorts of fascinating new angles on the famous siblings…Illuminating." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air In this unique and lovingly detailed biography, Victorian literature scholar Deborah Lutz illuminates the fascinating lives of the Brontës through the things they wore, stitched, and inscribed. Lutz immerses readers in a nuanced re-creation of the sisters’ days while moving us chronologically through their lives. From the miniature books they made as children to the walking sticks they carried on hikes on the moors, each possession opens a window onto the sisters’ world, their beloved fiction, and the Victorian era.

"The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero - his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontes, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives."--BOOK JACKET.

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

The debut novel in a stunningly lush, intensely sexy new Victorian and Scottish-set historical romance series.

Although the year 1984 is hurtling back into the distant past, Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to have a huge readership and to help shape the world of 2084. Sales of Orwell’s terrifying tale have recently spiked because of current worries about alternate facts, post-truth, and fake news. 1984 and Philosophy brings together brand new, up-to-the-minute thinking by philosophers about Nineteen Eighty-Four as it relates to today’s culture, politics, and everyday life. Some of the thinking amounts to thoughtcrime, but we managed to sneak it past the agents of the Ministry of Truth, so this is a book to be read quickly before the words on the page mysteriously transform into something different. Who’s controlling our lives and are they getting even more levers to control us? Is truth objective or just made up? What did Orwell get right—and did he get some things wrong? Are social media opportunities for liberation or instruments of oppression? How can we fight back against totalitarian control? Can Big Brother compel us to love him? How does the language we use affect the way we think? Do we really need the unifying power of hate? Why did Orwell make Nineteen Eighty-Four so desperately hopeless? Can science be protected from poisonous ideology? Can we really believe two contradictory things at once? Who surveils the surveilors?

In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.