English Fiction of the Victorian Period
Title | English Fiction of the Victorian Period PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Wheeler |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 305 |
Release | 2014-01-14 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317896084 |
Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised for this second edition to include new material on lesser-known writers and a comprehensively updated bibliography.
The Victorian Novel
Title | The Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Francis O'Gorman |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Pages | 370 |
Release | 2008-04-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0470779853 |
This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.
The Victorian Period
Title | The Victorian Period PDF eBook |
Author | Robin Gilmour |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 332 |
Release | 2014-09-19 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317871316 |
This is a thought-provoking synthesis of the Victorian period, focusing on the themes of science, religion, politics and art. It examines the developments which radically changed the intellectual climate and illustrates how their manifestations permeated Victorian literature. The author begins by establishing the social and institutional framework in which intellectual and cultural life developed. Special attention is paid to the reform agenda of new groups which challenged traditional society, and this perspective informs Gilmour's discussion throughout the book. He assesses Victorian religion, science and politics in their own terms and in relation to the larger cultural politics of the middle-class challenge to traditionalism. Familiar topics, such as the Oxford Movement and Darwinism, are seen afresh, and those once neglected areas which are now increasingly important to modern scholars are brought into clear focus, such as Victorian agnosticism, the politics of gender, 'Englishness', and photography. The most innovative feature of this compelling study is the prominence given to the contemporary preoccupation with time. The Victorians' time-hauntedness emerges as the defining feature of their civilisation - the remote time of geology and evolution, the public time of history, the private time of autobiography.
English Victorian Poetry
Title | English Victorian Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Negri |
Publisher | Courier Corporation |
Pages | 244 |
Release | 2012-03-02 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 0486112632 |
Over 170 beloved poems by the major poets of the 19th century, including works by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, Meredith, Swinburne, Hopkins, Kipling, and others. An introduction and biographical notes on the poets are included.
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Title | How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF eBook |
Author | Leah Price |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 361 |
Release | 2012-04-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1400842182 |
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Victorian Literature
Title | Victorian Literature PDF eBook |
Author | David Amigoni |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2011-03-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0748631089 |
How were the genres of literature changed by new methods of serialization and publishing? How did a widespread culture of performance emerge in the period to shape as well as to be shaped by the novel and poetry? David Amigoni draws on the most recent critical approaches to the novel, Victorian melodrama and poetry to answer these and other questions. The work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle and Mathew Arnold are explored in relation to ideas about fiction, journalism, drama, poetry, the New Woman, gothic, horror and the Victorian stage.
Victorian Literature and the Victorian State
Title | Victorian Literature and the Victorian State PDF eBook |
Author | Lauren M. E. Goodlad |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Pages | 317 |
Release | 2004-12-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0801881544 |
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.