Author: Helen Kingstone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351172824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
The Victorian era is famous for the collecting, hording, and displaying of things; for the mass production and consumption of things; for the invention, distribution and sale of things; for those who had things, and those who did not. For many people, the Victorian period is intrinsically associated with paraphernalia. This collection of essays explores the Victorians through their materiality, and asks how objects were part of being Victorian; which objects defined them, represented them, were uniquely theirs; and how reading the Victorians, through their possessions, can deepen our understanding of Victorian culture. Miscellaneous and often auxiliary, paraphernalia becomes the ‘disjecta’ of everyday life, deemed neither valuable enough for museums nor symbolic enough for purely literary study. This interdisciplinary collection looks at the historical, cultural and literary debris that makes up the background of Victorian life: Valentine’s cards, fish tanks, sugar plums, china ornaments, hair ribbons, dresses and more. Contributors also, however, consider how we use Victorian objects to construct the Victorian today; museum spaces, the relation of Victorian text to object, and our reading – or gazing at – Victorian advertisements out of context on searchable online databases. Responding to thing theory and modern scholarship on Victorian material culture, this book addresses five key concerns of Victorian materiality: collecting; defining class in the home; objects becoming things; objects to texts; objects in circulation through print culture.
Author: Sarah E. Maier
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031062019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.
Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131540012X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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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. The fourth volume will look at raw materials that were handled and used by Victorians including blubber and coal.
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.
Author: Silvia Granata
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526151952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
The Victorian aquarium explores the vogue for home tanks that spread through Great Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century. This book offers an example of how the study of a particular object can be used to address a broad spectrum of issues. The Victorian aquarium became in fact a point of intersection between scientific, technological and cultural trends; it engaged with issues of class, gender, nationality and inter-species relations; it drew together home décor and ideals of domesticity, travel and tourism, exciting discoveries in marine biology and tensions between competing views of science; it also marked an important moment in the development of a burgeoning environmental awareness. Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, including aquarium manuals, articles and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium unearths the historical significance of nineteenth-century tanks, reconstructing their far-ranging cultural resonance.
Author: Priyanka Anne Jacob
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198917953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
The Victorian Novel On File argues that the nineteenth-century information explosion shapes the novel form. In a world teeming with data, the novel is a storage medium, cluttered with detail and accumulating more than it can use. The fictional things that have been read as insignificant should be seen instead as vessels of information, embedding the text with potential. This study weaves together a formal account of the novel with media and information studies as well as new materialist approaches to objects. Information took material form in the nineteenth century: in Victorian literature, data can be located in bric-a-brac, folded-up papers, semi-precious stones, and rubbish heaps. Yet this information may never be transmitted as knowledge. Instead, the novel offers indefinite storage, gesturing toward the future while holding action and accountability in abeyance. Fallen by the wayside of plot are documents left on file, containers left unopened, stock left on the shelf, and secrets left untold-enacting, this study argues, the Victorian novel's aesthetics of deferral. In readings of works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Rudyard Kipling, this study illustrates the formal effects of cultural questions about value and meaning, longevity and history, abundance and overwhelm, and keeping and discarding. It closes by showing how these same questions animate the twenty-first century's information culture as well.
Author: Pamela Buck
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture.
Author: Mary McAleer Balkun
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119669685
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532
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Book Description
A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries. Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.
Author: Rhiannon Ifans
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786833727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
Who was Saint Valentine, the saint who gave his name to the festival of lovers in Wales? Where do red hearts and roses fit in? Or do they? This volume addresses these questions, but focuses more specifically on the previously unpublished Welsh poetry written over the centuries on the feast day of Saint Valentine in mid-February, the one saint’s day in the Christian calendar of saints that does not depend on the Church for a celebration of the feast day – far from resembling anything else on offer in any other part of Britain, these Welsh songs are lyrical, expressive, and often in cynghanedd (the concept of sound-arrangement within a line). This volume analyses the first extant Welsh Saint Valentine’s Day poems, and advances a new understanding of societal propriety in settings where citizens paid great attention to tradition. In so doing, it offers new insights into the tradition of observing Saint Valentine’s Day in Wales and, indeed, argues that although it is the fifth-century Dwynwen who is today considered to be the patron saint of Welsh lovers, Saint Valentine also handed out aid and sympathy to lovers in Wales over many centuries. To read Rhiannon Ifans article on her volume, visit Parallel.Cymru website https://parallel.cymru/rhiannon-ifans-red-hearts-and-roses/
Author: Owen Davies
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030767655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
This book redresses popular interpretations of concealed objects, enigmatically discovered within the fabric of post-medieval buildings. A wide variety of objects have been found up chimneybreasts, bricked up in walls, and concealed within recesses: old shoes, mummified cats, horse skulls, pierced hearts, to name only some. The most common approach to these finds is to apply a one-size-fits-all analysis and label them survivals and apotropaic (evil-averting) devices. This book reconsiders such interpretations, exploring the invention and reinvention of traditions regarding building magic. The title Building Magic therefore refers to more than practices that alter the fabric of buildings, but also to processes of building magic into our interpretations of the enigmatic material evidence and into our engagements with the buildings we inhabit and frequent.
