Author: John R. Davis
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039110650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Get Book Here
Book Description
Of all the parts of the world to interest the Victorians, Germany was among the most important. Though less well known today, partly in consequence of the events of the twentieth century, German influences in Britain were strong, and their legacy substantial. This book charts the emergence, development and course of the Victorian interest in Germany. Its multidisciplinary approach, which binds together for the first time the latest research conducted in a variety of areas, shows how a discourse developed in Britain regarding Germany and the Germans which spilled over from one area of life to another, and included some of the most prominent figures in Victorian life. It provides a framework for understanding the causes of the Victorian fascination with Germany, and argues forcefully that the roots of this lay in the processes of modernisation taking place in each place respectively. It also points to the deep impact this had upon the course of British history and reveals how it prepared the ground for the future direction of Anglo-German relations.
Author: Matthew Sweet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466872713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
Author: Linda Hughes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book Here
Book Description
Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.
Author: Iain Hutchison
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
Disability and the Victorians investigates the attitudes of Victorians towards people with impairments, illustrates how these influenced the interventions they introduced to support such people and considers the legacies they left behind by their actions and perspectives. A range of impairments are addressed in a variety of contexts.
Author: Barbara Franchi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152750963X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.
Author: Falco Pfalzgraf
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039116560
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is a collection of papers presented at the conference «Anglo-German Linguistic Relations», held at Queen Mary, University of London in November 2007. The papers cover a wide variety of topics about the relationship between the English and German languages or relate to cultural and literary contacts between English-speaking and German-speaking regions. Individual papers discuss Anglo-German linguistic interplay and affinities both as contemporary phenomena and from a historical perspective. Themes include codification, translation and discourse production from the 17th century to the Second World War; shared metaphors in English and German; political propaganda in English and German; and authorial positioning and perspective in a selection of autobiographical and literary works.
Author: Andrew Wawn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0859916448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Get Book Here
Book Description
Andrew Wawn draws together a wide range of source material, including novels, poems, lectures and periodicals, to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th century Britain.
Author: Fion Wai Ling So
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131735902X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores the economic development of the northern Chinese city of Qingdao, which was held by Germany as a colony from 1898 to 1914. It focuses especially on the economic polices of the German colonial government and of the provincial government of the neighbouring Chinese province of Shandong, considering amongst other issues free trade and protection, the impact of the Gold Standard and assistance given to particular companies. The book shows how the Qingdao and Shandong economies fitted into overall East Asian and global trade patterns and how during this period these economies became more fully integrated into the world economy. The book concludes by discussing how although there was a great deal of co-operation between the Qingdao and Shandong governments, there were also growing tensions.
Author: Susie L. Steinbach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000898962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of an era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates on the nineteenth century taking place among historians today. The volume encompasses all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period and gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasizes class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This third edition is fully updated with new chapters on emotion and on Britain’s relationship with Europe as well as added discussions of architecture, technology, and the visual arts. Attention to the current concerns and priorities of professional historians also enables readers to engage with today’s historical debates. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, thematic chapters explore the topics of space, politics, Europe, the empire, the economy, consumption, class, leisure, gender, the monarchy, the law, arts and entertainment, sexuality, religion, and science. With a clear introduction outlining the key themes of the period, a detailed timeline, and suggestions for further reading and relevant internet resources, this is the ideal companion for all students of the nineteenth century. Discover more from Susie by exploring our forthcoming Routledge Historical resource on British Society, edited by Susie L. Steinbach and Martin Hewitt. Find out more about our Routledge Historical resources by visiting https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com.
Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466835451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.
