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Author: Gemma Almond-Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526161362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists’ attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.
Author: Gemma Almond-Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526161362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists’ attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.
Author: Lillian Craton
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604976535
Category : Literary Criticism & Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
"The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.
Author: Kathryn Hughes
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142142570X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.
Author: Karen Chase
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.
Author: Shawn Malley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317132521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.
Author: Russell A. Potter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295986807
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The nineteenth-century fascination with visual representations of the Arctic is illuminated in this history that weaves together a narrative of the major Arctic expeditions with an account of their public reception through art and mass media. Simultaneous.
Author: Ann C. Colley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317001990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
In her compelling book, Ann C. Colley examines the shift away from the cult of the sublime that characterized the early part of the nineteenth century to the less reverential perspective from which the Victorians regarded mountain landscapes. And what a multifaceted perspective it was, as unprecedented numbers of the Victorian middle and professional classes took themselves off on mountaineering holidays so commonplace that the editors of Punch sarcastically reported that the route to the summit of Mont Blanc was to be carpeted. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers; almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley's examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century. In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions to the Himalayas affected people's sense of the sublime, arguing that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her ambitious book is an astute exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender, spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were intruding on what before had seemed inviolable.
Author: Matthew Sweet
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312283261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Revises and reevaluates the many concepts and images surrounding the Victorians, a society that was responsible for spin-doctoring, lavish publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, theme parks, crime novels, and scandalous journalism.
Author: Thomas Richards
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"
Author: Jodie Lynn Zdrok
Publisher: Tor Teen
ISBN: 0765399709
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Eighteen-year-old Nathalie Baudin, ever-curious reporter at the Paris morgue, is no stranger to death—even discounting the supernatural visions that give her disturbing glimpses into the minds of killers. Paris, 1889. When the Exposition Universelle opens in Paris, Nathalie welcomes a much-needed break from the heartache of her friend's murder. The fair is full of sensational innovations, cultural displays, and marvelous inventions from around the world. But someone is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the guillotine with a gruesome display of their own: beheaded victims in some of the Exposition’s most popular exhibits. Haunted by the past and burdened with new secrets, Nathalie struggles to use her wits and her gift. Yet she and her friends must stop the killer before the macabre display features one of them... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
