Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848445X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
Author: Sean Grass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108706209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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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.
Author: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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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.
Author: Philip Steer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.
Author: Matthew Sussman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108967248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
An innovative approach to literary stylistic analysis that targets students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture through provocative interpretations of style in Victorian novels and succinct revaluations of major figures in rhetoric, criticism, and philosophy.
Author: Linda Hughes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.
Author: Alistair Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009022393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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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.
Author: Sarah Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831516
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.
Author: Richard Fallon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920
Author: Jan Alber
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442693134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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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.
