Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics PDF Author: Clinton Machann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317099796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics PDF Author: Clinton Machann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317099796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic PDF Author: Václav Paris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Modernist epic is more interesting and more diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century—a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as 'the eclipse of Darwinism'—evolution's significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling national stories, the genre contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a new basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.

Out of his mind

Out of his mind PDF Author: Amy Milne-Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526155044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Out of His Mind interrogates how Victorians made sense of the madman as both a social reality and a cultural representation. Even at the height of enthusiasm for the curative powers of nineteenth-century psychiatry, to be certified as a lunatic meant a loss of one’s freedom and in many ways one’s identify. Because men had the most power and authority in Victorian Britain, this also meant they had the most to lose. The madman was often a marginal figure, confined in private homes, hospitals, and asylums. Yet as a cultural phenomenon he loomed large, tapping into broader social anxieties about respectability, masculine self-control, and fears of degeneration. Using a wealth of case notes, press accounts, literature, medical and government reports, this text provides a rich window into public understandings and personal experiences of men’s insanity.

Why Lyrics Last

Why Lyrics Last PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674069196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
In Why Lyrics Last, the internationally acclaimed critic Brian Boyd turns an evolutionary lens on the subject of lyric verse. He finds that lyric making, though it presents no advantages for the species in terms of survival and reproduction, is “universal across cultures because it fits constraints of the human mind.” An evolutionary perspective— especially when coupled with insights from aesthetics and literary history—has much to tell us about both verse and the lyrical impulse. Boyd places the writing of lyrical verse within the human disposition “to play with pattern,” and in an extended example he uncovers the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare’s bid for readership is unlike that of any sonneteer before him: he deliberately avoids all narrative, choosing to maximize the openness of the lyric and demonstrating the power that verse can have when liberated of story. In eschewing narrative, Shakespeare plays freely with patterns of other kinds: words, images, sounds, structures; emotions and moods; argument and analogy; and natural rhythms, in daily, seasonal, and life cycles. In the originality of his stratagems, and in their sheer number and variety, both within and between sonnets, Shakespeare outdoes all competitors. A reading of the Sonnets informed by evolution is primed to attend to these complexities and better able to appreciate Shakespeare’s remarkable gambit for immortal fame.

The Measure of Manliness

The Measure of Manliness PDF Author: Karen Bourrier
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Sheds new light on the narrative importance of the disabled man in Victorian literature and culture

Imagology Profiles

Imagology Profiles PDF Author: Laura Laurušaitė
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527514625
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This volume highlights the importance of imagology, one of the most popular areas of research in contemporary comparative studies. It proposes new means of academic analysis to create critical attitudes towards the development of imagological studies. The topics discussed draw a wide trajectory, from classical to marginal images, from national heroes to (un)conventional aspects of gender, from ethno-imagology to the broader dimension of intercultural references and epistemological post-poststructuralist changes. The compendium widens the field of imagology by introducing concepts such as “geo-imagology” and “imagology of gender”, and by linking the imagological strategy with the power principle developed by post-colonialism and with the fictional project of an imaginary utopian society. The essays selected include case studies focusing on the works of individual authors, as well as broader insights concentrating on regional, national and transnational identities that experienced a change of imagery due to historical, political and social shifts. The book pays particular attention to the aspects of mobile imagery, the emergence of peripheral identities related to gender, class, ethnicity or race, and the detection and assessment of well-established stereotypes. The scope of the topics discussed and the variety of periods covered imply the universal nature and versatile applicability of literary imagology.

The Moxon Tennyson

The Moxon Tennyson PDF Author: Simon Cooke
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
A new perspective on a book that transformed Victorian illustration into a stand-alone art. Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems dramatically redefined the relationship between images and words in print. Cooke’s study, the first book to address the subject in over 120 years, presents a sweeping analysis of the illustrators and the complex and challenging ways in which they interpreted Tennyson’s poetry. This book considers the volume’s historical context, examining in detail the roles of publisher, engravers, and binding designer, as well as the material difficulties of printing its fine illustrations, which recreate the effects of painting. Arranged thematically and reproducing all the original images, the chapters present a detailed reappraisal of the original volume and the distinctive culture that produced it.

Reading Poetry, Writing Genre

Reading Poetry, Writing Genre PDF Author: Silvio Bär
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350039349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This ground-breaking volume connects the situatedness of genre in English poetry with developments in classical scholarship, exploring how an emphasis on the interaction between English literary criticism and Classics changes, sharpens, or perhaps even obstructs views on genre in English poetry. “Genre” has classical roots: both in the etymology of the word and in the history of genre criticism, which begins with Aristotle. In a similar vein, recent developments in genre studies have suggested that literary genres are not given or fixed entities, but subjective and unstable (as well as historically situated), and that the reception of genre by both writers and scholars feeds back into the way genre is articulated in specific literary works. Classical scholarship, literary criticism, and genre form a triangle of key concepts for the volume, approached in different ways and with different productive results by contributors from across the disciplines of Classics and English literature. Covering topics from the establishment of genre in the Middle Ages to the invention of female epic and the epyllion, and bringing together the works of English poets from Milton to Tennyson to Josephine Balmer, the essays collected hereargue that the reception and criticism of classical texts play a crucial part in generic formation in English poetry.

Haiti in the British Imagination

Haiti in the British Imagination PDF Author: Jack Daniel Webb
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800346743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

Nineteenth Century Prose

Nineteenth Century Prose PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description