Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914

Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 PDF Author: Ruth Livesey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book examines the lives and works of a group of writers at the heart of the revival of the socialist movement in Britain. It examines the beliefs and sexual politics of familiar figures like William Morris and George Bernard Shaw alongside those of lesser-known writers and activists like Edward Carpenter and Isabella Ford.

Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914

Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 PDF Author: Ruth Livesey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book examines the lives and works of a group of writers at the heart of the revival of the socialist movement in Britain. It examines the beliefs and sexual politics of familiar figures like William Morris and George Bernard Shaw alongside those of lesser-known writers and activists like Edward Carpenter and Isabella Ford.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191082104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 813

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.

Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late-Victorian London

Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late-Victorian London PDF Author: Geoffrey A. C. Ginn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351732803
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title ******************************** The Late-Victorian cultural mission to London’s slums was a peculiar effort towards social reform that today is largely forgotten or misunderstood. The philanthropy of middle and upper-class social workers saw hundreds of art exhibitions, concerts of fine music, evening lectures, clubs and socials, debates and excursions mounted for the benefit of impoverished and working-class Londoners. Ginn’s vivid and provocative book captures many of these in detail for the first time. In refreshing our understanding of this obscure but eloquent activism, Ginn approaches cultural philanthropy not simply as a project of class self-interest, nor as fanciful ‘missionary aestheticism.’ Rather, he shows how liberal aspirations towards adult education and civic community can be traced in a number of centres of moralising voluntary effort. Concentrating on Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, the People’s Palace in Mile End, Red Cross Hall in Southwark and the Bermondsey Settlement, the discussion identifies the common impulses animating practical reformers across these settings. Drawing on new primary research to clarify reformers’ underlying intentions and strategies, Ginn shows how these were shaped by a distinctive diagnosis of urban deprivation and anomie. In rebutting the common view that cultural philanthropy was a crudely paternalistic attempt to impose ‘rational recreation’ on the poor, this volume explores its sources in a liberal-minded social idealism common to both religious and secular conceptions of social welfare in this period. Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late-Victorian London appeals to students and researchers of Victorian culture, moral reform, urbanism, adult education and philanthropy, who will be fascinated by this underrated but lively aspect of the period’s social activism.

Oscar Wilde in Context

Oscar Wilde in Context PDF Author: Kerry Powell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016134
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde PDF Author: David Cottington
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300265077
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the “avant-garde” in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Walter Pater and Persons

Walter Pater and Persons PDF Author: Stephen Cheeke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019892027X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.

William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment

William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment PDF Author: James Grande
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Cobbett was one of the greatest journalists of his day. Following a career in the British army he began writing as the loyalist 'Peter Porcupine' in the United States, defending all things British against the French Revolution and its supporters. This is the first collection on Cobbett and contains essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Margaret Harkness

Margaret Harkness PDF Author: Flore Janssen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526123525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This collection places the life and work of Margaret Harkness at the heart of a broader consideration of the socially turbulent decades around the turn of the twentieth century in order to illuminate historical forms of women’s political activism.

Whitechapel Noise

Whitechapel Noise PDF Author: Vivi Lachs
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814343562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In part one of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. For example, how Morris Winchevsky’s London poetry shows various attempts to engage the Jewish immigrant worker in specific London activism and political debate. Lachs explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. On the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noiseoffers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.

Behind the Times

Behind the Times PDF Author: Mary Jean Corbett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it. Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright, Lucy Clifford; the novelist and anti-suffragist, Mary Augusta Ward. It explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, Corbett complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.