Author: Belinda Starling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196046
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
London, 1860: On the brink of destitution, Dora Damage illicitly takes over her ailing husband's bookbinding business, only to find herself lured into binding expensive volumes of pornography commissioned by aristocratic roués. Dora's charm and indefatigable spirit carry her through this rude awakening as she contends with violent debt collectors, an epileptic daughter, evil doctors, a rheumatic husband, errant workmen, nosy neighbors, and a constant stream of wealthy dilettantes. When she suddenly finds herself forced to offer an internship to a mysterious, fugitive American slave, Dora realizes she has been pulled into in an illegal trade of sex, money, and deceit. The Journal of Dora Damage conjures a vision of London when it was the largest city in the world, grappling with the filth produced by a swollen population. Against a backdrop of power and politics, work and idleness, conservatism and abolitionism, Belinda Starling explores the restrictions of gender, class, and race, the ties of family and love, and the price of freedom in this wholly engrossing debut novel. REVIEWS: "Unfortunately, Starling's debut novel will be her last; she died prematurely last year at the age of 34. Although the plot is a bit too crowded and overworked-a common novice mistake-this historical melodrama artfully evokes the contradictions inherent in Victorian society. When Dora Damage is forced by circumstances-an invalid husband and an epileptic daughter-to take over the family bookbinding business, she is inexorably drawn into a London netherworld she barely knew existed. As if binding pornographic books for a circle of aristocratic clients isn't bad enough, she is also compelled to harbor Din Nelson, a fugitive American slave. Unable to suppress her emotional and physical attraction for Din, she gives into desire and her real education begins."- Booklist
Author: Colleen Hoover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 153872474X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Late and It Ends With Us. #1 New York Times Bestseller · USA Today Bestseller · Globe and Mail Bestseller · Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.
Author: Belinda Starling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780747593256
Category : Bookbinders
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
London, 1859- By the time Dora Damage discovers that her husband Peter's hands have arthritis, it is too late - their book-binding business is in huge debt and the family is on the brink of entering the poorhouse. But Dora proves that she is more than just a housewife and mother. She resolves to rescue her family at any price - and she finds herself illegally binding expensive volumes of pornography and irrevocably entangled in a web of sex, money and deceit.
Author: Ann Heilmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230281699
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This field-defining book offers an interpretation of the recent figurations of neo-Victorianism published over the last ten years. Using a range of critical and cultural viewpoints, it highlights the problematic nature of this 'new' genre and its relationship to re-interpretative critical perspectives on the nineteenth century.
Author: Megen de Bruin-Molé
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350103071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Longlisted for the 2022 International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize The bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives invaded by zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other fantastical monsters. Too engaged with tradition for some and not traditional enough for others, these 'monster mashups' are often criticized as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. These hybrid creations are the 'monsters' of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.
Author: Juan-José Martín-González
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030770567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-José Martín-González draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today’s most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martín-González explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004434356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.
Author: Muren Zhang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
In the words of J. Brooks Boustan, the empathic reader is a participant-observer, who, as they read, is both subject to the disruptive and disturbing responses that characters and texts provoke, and aware of the role they are invited to play when responding to fiction. Calling upon the writings of Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Sarah Waters, Michael Cox and Jane Harris, this book examines the ethics of the text-reader relationship in neo-Victorian literature, focusing upon the role played by empathy in this engagement. Bringing together recent cultural and theoretical research on narrative temporality, empathy and affect, Muren Zhang presents neo-Victorian literature as a genre defined by its experimentation with 'empathetic narrative'. Broken down into themes such as voyeurism, shame, nausea, space and place, Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading argues that such literature pushes the reader to critically reflect upon their reading expectations and strategies, as well as their wider ethical responsibilities. As a result, Zhang breathes new life into the debates associated with the genre and demonstrates new ways of reading and valuing these contemporary texts, providing a future-orientated, reparative and politically meaningful way of reading neo-Victorian literature and culture.
Author: Milena Kaličanin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144388474X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
This book explores contemporary transformations of the female Bildungsroman, showing that the intersection of the genre and gender brought to critical attention in the context of second wave feminism remains of equal importance in the era of postfeminism. The female Bildung narrative has acquired an important position in twentieth – and twenty-first century literature through its continuing depiction of female self-discovery and emancipation as a process of negotiating the traditional divisions of female and male roles in relation to the private and public spaces. Recognizing the seminal contribution of feminist criticism to the definition of the genre and the role of feminist cultural processes in its thematic developments, this volume investigates more recent influences on the female Bildung narrative and the influence of the classic female Bildungsroman on contemporary cultural texts. As a collection of fifteen essays written by international scholars, the book offers a representative sample of the narratives of female development, presenting a variety of genres, including the novel, the short story, autobiography, TV series, and Internet video blogs, and theoretical frameworks, adopting hermeneutic, postcolonial, feminist, and postfeminist perspectives. In its diversity, this volume reveals that, despite the ongoing process of women’s emancipation, the heroine’s struggle with the private/public divide has remained, throughout the twentieth century and in the first decades of the new millennium, a central issue in stories about the female quest for self-definition. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of literary, women and gender studies, particularly those interested in the narratives of female development that represent American and British cultural contexts.
Author: Tegan Zimmerman
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643905602
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
For the first time in the literary tradition, the contemporary woman's historical novel (post-1970) is surveyed from a transnational feminist perspective. Analyzing the maternal (the genre's central theme) reveals that historical fiction is a transnational feminist means for challenging historical erasures, silences, normative sexuality, political exclusion, and divisions of labor. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 5)
