Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108807542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108807542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book

Book Description
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477593
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence PDF 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.

Victorian Material Culture

Victorian Material Culture PDF Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315399962
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, ‘Fashionable Things’, will focus on Victorian fads and fashions ranging from chatelains to insect jewellery.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction PDF 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.

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages PDF Author: Eavan O'Dochartaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834337
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature PDF 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

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany PDF 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.

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry PDF Author: Francesca Mackenney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910 PDF Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108998348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.