Victorian demons

Victorian demons PDF Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526125579
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Victorian demons provides the first extensive exploration of largely middle-class masculinities in crisis at the fin de siècle. It analyses how ostensibly controlling models of masculinity became demonised in a variety of literary and medical contexts, revealing the period to be much more ideologically complex than has hitherto been understood, and makes a significant contribution to Gothic scholarship. Andrew Smith demonstrates how a Gothic language of monstrosity, drawn from narratives such as 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and 'Dracula', increasingly influenced a range of medical and cultural contexts, destabilising these apparently dominant masculine scripts. He provides a coherent analysis of a range of examples relating to masculinity drawn from literary, medical, legal and sociological contexts, including Joseph Merrick ('The Elephant Man'), the Whitechapel murders of 1888, Sherlock Holmes's London, the writings and trials of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration and medical textbooks on syphilis.

Victorian demons

Victorian demons PDF Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526125579
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
Victorian demons provides the first extensive exploration of largely middle-class masculinities in crisis at the fin de siècle. It analyses how ostensibly controlling models of masculinity became demonised in a variety of literary and medical contexts, revealing the period to be much more ideologically complex than has hitherto been understood, and makes a significant contribution to Gothic scholarship. Andrew Smith demonstrates how a Gothic language of monstrosity, drawn from narratives such as 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and 'Dracula', increasingly influenced a range of medical and cultural contexts, destabilising these apparently dominant masculine scripts. He provides a coherent analysis of a range of examples relating to masculinity drawn from literary, medical, legal and sociological contexts, including Joseph Merrick ('The Elephant Man'), the Whitechapel murders of 1888, Sherlock Holmes's London, the writings and trials of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration and medical textbooks on syphilis.

Woman and the Demon

Woman and the Demon PDF Author: Nina Auerbach
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674954076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature.

The Late Victorian Gothic

The Late Victorian Gothic PDF Author: Hilary Grimes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317026268
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture

Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture PDF Author: Saverio Tomaiuolo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319969501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book argues that ‘deviance’ represents a central issue in neo-Victorian culture, and that the very concept of neo-Victorianism is based upon the idea of ‘diverging’ from accepted notions regarding the nineteenth-century frame of mind. However, the study of the ways in which the Victorian age has been revised by contemporary authors does not only entail analogies with the present but proves – by introducing what is perhaps a more pertinent description of the nineteenth century – that it was much more ‘deviant’ than it is usually depicted and perceived. Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation explores a wide variety of textual forms, from novels to TV series, from movies and graphic novels to visual art. The scholarly and educational purpose of this study is to stimulate readers to approach neo-Victorianism as a complex cultural phenomenon.

The Literature of Love

The Literature of Love PDF Author: Mary Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521729815
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. The Literature of Love is designed to introduce students to one of the central themes in literature. Focusing first on different types and aspects of love - physical, emotional, spiritual - it then offers a chronological coverage, aiming to illustrate ways in which attitudes to the representation of love in literature have evolved from Chaucer to the present time. Other sections of the book examine particular genres such as the love sonnet, the love letter and 'romantic' fiction; and the differing reception of this literature over time is also considered. The book includes extracts from a range of authors.

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell PDF Author: Moniez Baptiste
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527500640
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.

Kept from All Contagion

Kept from All Contagion PDF Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786831031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic. This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space

The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space PDF Author: Katarzyna Więckowska
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848880995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012. The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space offers a critical examination of gothic elements in fiction, film and popular culture texts from the beginnings of the genre to the present. The articles collected in the volume explore questions of identity, space, history and social equilibrium as portrayed through a distinctly Gothic imagery. Tracing a gothic itinerary through different times and places - from the English classic Gothic novels and their Italian counterpart to postcolonial and postmodern fiction and to contemporary film and fashion - it presents a persuasive account of how and why the Gothic continues to fascinate readers and critics alike.

Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle

Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle PDF Author: S. Karschay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137450339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This exciting new study looks at degeneration and deviance in nineteenth-century science and late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The questions it raises are as relevant today as they were at the nineteenth century's fin de siecle: What constitutes the norm from which a deviation has occurred? What exactly does it mean to be 'normal' or 'abnormal'?