Ugliness and Judgment

Ugliness and Judgment PDF Author: Timothy Hyde
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691243557
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

Ugliness and Judgment

Ugliness and Judgment PDF Author: Timothy Hyde
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691243557
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Nadine Böhm-Schnitker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000966488
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re-integrates aesthetics – a much fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular’ over ‘high culture’ – into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word’s root sense of ‘perception’. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, aisthetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore the way in which the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time.

The Affective Life of the Average Man

The Affective Life of the Average Man PDF Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Victorian Critical Interventio
ISBN: 9780814211151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book

Book Description
1What do the Victorian novel and the stock-market graph have in common? In The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph, ,,Audrey Jaffe explores the influence on modern subjectivity of an economic and emotional discourse constructed by both the Victorian novel and the stock market. The book shows how the novel and the market define character as fundamentally vicarious, and how the graphs, tickers, and pulses that represent the stock market function for us, as the novel did for the Victorians, as both representation and source of collective expectations and emotions. A rereading of key Victorian texts, this volume is also a rereading of the relation between Victorian and contemporary culture, describing the way contemporary accounts of such phenomena as frauds, bubbles, and the economics of happiness reproduce Victorian narratives and assumptions about character. Jaffe draws on the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and political theorists, popular discourse about the stock market, and novelistic representations of emotion and identity to offer new readings of George Eliot's Middlemarch, Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister, and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. Charting a new understanding of the relation between money, emotions, and identity, The Affective Life of the Average Man makes a significant contribution to Victorian studies, economic criticism, and the study of the history and representation of emotion.

My Victorian Novel

My Victorian Novel PDF Author: Annette R. Federico
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book

Book Description
The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism PDF Author: Donald R. Wehrs
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319633031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 883

Get Book

Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

The Bigamy Plot

The Bigamy Plot PDF Author: Maia McAleavey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107103169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
This study explores the prevalence of bigamy in Victorian fiction to challenge traditional understanding of the period's social and narrative conventions.

From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature

From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Elaine Hadley
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030241580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book

Book Description
Focusing on the transition from political economy to economics, this volume seeks to restore social content to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century British and American literature. The essays gathered here, by new as well as established scholars of literature and economics, link important nineteenth-century texts and histories with present-day issues such as exploitation, income inequality, globalization, energy consumption, property ownership and rent, human capital, corporate power, and environmental degradation. Organized according to key concepts for future research, the collection has a clear interdisciplinary, humanities approach and international reach. These diverse essays will interest students and scholars in literature, history, political science, economics, sociology, law, and cultural studies, in addition to readers generally interested in the Victorian period.

Populating the Novel

Populating the Novel PDF Author: Emily Steinlight
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501710710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907

Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 PDF Author: Melissa Shields Jenkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317136306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City

Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City PDF Author: Martin Hewitt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000012212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book

Book Description
This study explores the ‘ecology of knowledge’ of urban Britain in the Victorian period and seeks to examine the way in which Victorians comprehended the nature of their urban society, through an exploration of the history of Victorian Manchester, and two specific case studies on the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell and the campaigns for educational extension which emerged out of the city. It argues that crucial to the Victorians’ approaches was the ‘visiting mode’ as a particular discursive formation, including its institutional foundations, its characteristic modes and assumptions, and the texts which exemplify it. Recognition of the importance of the visiting mode, it is argued, offers a fundamental challenge to established Foucauldian interpretations of nineteenthcentury society and culture and provides an important corrective to recent scholarship of nineteenth-century technologies of knowing.