Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848445X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848445X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848445X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108706209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108706209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.
Personation Plots
Author: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.
Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction
Author: Matthew Sussman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108967248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
What is style, and why does it matter? This book answers these questions by recovering the concept of 'stylistic virtue,' once foundational to rhetoric and aesthetics but largely forgotten today. Stylistic virtues like 'ease' and 'grace' are distinguishing properties that help realize a text's essential character. First described by Aristotle, they were integral to the development of formalist methods and modern literary criticism. The first half of the book excavates the theory of stylistic virtue during its period of greatest ascendance, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when belletristic rhetoric shaped how the art of literary style and 'the aesthetic' were understood. The second half offers new readings of Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith to show how stylistic virtue changes our understanding of style in the novel and challenges conventional approaches to interpreting the ethics of art.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108967248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
What is style, and why does it matter? This book answers these questions by recovering the concept of 'stylistic virtue,' once foundational to rhetoric and aesthetics but largely forgotten today. Stylistic virtues like 'ease' and 'grace' are distinguishing properties that help realize a text's essential character. First described by Aristotle, they were integral to the development of formalist methods and modern literary criticism. The first half of the book excavates the theory of stylistic virtue during its period of greatest ascendance, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when belletristic rhetoric shaped how the art of literary style and 'the aesthetic' were understood. The second half offers new readings of Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith to show how stylistic virtue changes our understanding of style in the novel and challenges conventional approaches to interpreting the ethics of art.
Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442693134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
The prison system was one of the primary social issues of the Victorian era and a regular focus of debate among the period?s reformers, novelists, and poets. Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame brings together essays from a broad range of scholars, who examine writings on the Victorian prison system that were authored not by inmates, but by thinkers from the respectable middle class. Studying the ways in which writings on prisons were woven into the fabric of the period, the contributors consider the ways in which these works affected inmates, the prison system, and the Victorian public. Contesting and extending Michel Foucault's ideas on power and surveillance in the Victorian prison system, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame covers texts from Charles Dickens to Henry James. This essential volume will refocus future scholarship on prison writing and the Victorian era.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442693134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
The prison system was one of the primary social issues of the Victorian era and a regular focus of debate among the period?s reformers, novelists, and poets. Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame brings together essays from a broad range of scholars, who examine writings on the Victorian prison system that were authored not by inmates, but by thinkers from the respectable middle class. Studying the ways in which writings on prisons were woven into the fabric of the period, the contributors consider the ways in which these works affected inmates, the prison system, and the Victorian public. Contesting and extending Michel Foucault's ideas on power and surveillance in the Victorian prison system, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame covers texts from Charles Dickens to Henry James. This essential volume will refocus future scholarship on prison writing and the Victorian era.
Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence
Author: Sarah Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831516
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831516
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature
Author: Richard Fallon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920
Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
Author: Philip Steer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.
Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany
Author: Linda Hughes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.
Vagrancy in the Victorian Age
Author: Alistair Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009022393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the country, casual paupers and loafers lingered in the city, and vagabonds and beachcombers roved the colonial frontiers. Uncovering the rich Victorian taxonomy of nineteenth-century vagrancy for the first time, this interdisciplinary study examines how assumptions about class, gender, race and environment shaped a series of distinct vagrant types. At the same time it broaches new ground by demonstrating that rural and urban conceptions of vagrancy were repurposed in colonial contexts. Representational strategies circulated globally as well as locally, and were used to articulate shifting fantasies and anxieties about mobility, poverty and homelessness. These are traced through an extensive corpus of canonical, ephemeral and popular texts as well as a variety of visual forms.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009022393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the country, casual paupers and loafers lingered in the city, and vagabonds and beachcombers roved the colonial frontiers. Uncovering the rich Victorian taxonomy of nineteenth-century vagrancy for the first time, this interdisciplinary study examines how assumptions about class, gender, race and environment shaped a series of distinct vagrant types. At the same time it broaches new ground by demonstrating that rural and urban conceptions of vagrancy were repurposed in colonial contexts. Representational strategies circulated globally as well as locally, and were used to articulate shifting fantasies and anxieties about mobility, poverty and homelessness. These are traced through an extensive corpus of canonical, ephemeral and popular texts as well as a variety of visual forms.