Journalist Rene Denfeld explains why her generation has become alienated from the women's movement, maintaining that the actions of the movement's current leadership have actually encouraged a return to the kind of sexual repression and political powerlessness challenged by feminists in the 1970s. Here she offers a practial battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.

Parallels between anti-welfare propagandists of the nineteenth century and well-funded policy research organizations of today are uncovered, revealing lessons that emphasize the needed support for state defense of the poor.

"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

Wilson singles out those whose lives illuminate the 19th century--Darwin, Marx, Gladstone, Kipling, and others--and explains through these signature lives how Victorian England started a revolution that still hasn't ended. of illustrations.

Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of this era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates taking place among historians today. Encompassing all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period, it gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasises class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This second edition is fully updated throughout, containing a new chapter on leisure in the Victorian period, the most recent historiographical research in Victorian Studies, and enhanced coverage of imperialism and working-class life. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, Susie L. Steinbach uses thematic chapters to discuss and evaluate topics such as politics, imperialism, the economy, class, gender, the monarchy, arts and entertainment, religion, sexuality, religion, and science. There are also three chapters on space, consumption, and the law, topics rarely covered at this introductory level. With a clear introduction outlining the key themes of the period, a detailed timeline, and suggestions for further reading and relevant internet resources, this is the ideal companion for all students of the nineteenth century.

What began in the late 1980s as an underground community of science fantasy aficionados with a fetish for Victoriana now pervades almost every aspect of popular culture from music and movies to comics and computer games. Steampunk is much more than a retro-futuristic fashion statement or a subgenre of science fiction. On the surface its adherents profess a penchant for neo-Victorian fashion, fanciful clockwork accessories and have a desire to live in an alternative reality inhabited by airships and eccentric inventions. But the literature, art, music and movies of this burgeoning community offer a radical and irreverent re-imagining of society the way it might have evolved had history taken a sharp detour prior to the industrial revolution giving us a world without electricity, the infernal (sic) combustion engine and the technology that we take for granted today. The world of steampunk is the elegant gas lit world of Jules Verne and HG Wells, of Michael Moorcock and their literary antecedents for whom the digital age never dawned. Author and musician Paul Roland traces the history of Steampunk, covering every element of the genre, from fashion and jewelry to music and literature, drawing on exclusive quotes from leading writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the field.