Victorian Writing about Risk

Victorian Writing about Risk PDF Author: Elaine Freedgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the labouring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change.

Victorian Writing about Risk

Victorian Writing about Risk PDF Author: Elaine Freedgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the labouring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191652512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars — beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' — the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

An Age of Risk

An Age of Risk PDF Author: Emily C. Nacol
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883016
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In An Age of Risk, Emily Nacol shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Nacol explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control. In these early modern sources, Nacol contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk—risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, Nacol locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, she argues, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope. By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, An Age of Risk demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.

Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing PDF Author: Adela Pinch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.

Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Heather Bozant Witcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316513491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Examining social and material dimensions of collaboration, this book reveals the diverse networks of nineteenth-century literary exchange.

Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century

Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Hilary Fraser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107075750
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book examines women's art writing in the nineteenth century, challenging the idea of art history as a masculine intellectual field.

The First Modern Risk

The First Modern Risk PDF Author: Julia Moses
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108631037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
During the late nineteenth century, many countries across Europe adopted national legislation that required employers to compensate workers injured or killed in accidents at work. These laws suggested that the risk of accidents was inherent to work and not due to individual negligence. By focusing on Britain, Germany, and Italy during this time, Julia Moses demonstrates how these laws reflected a major transformation in thinking about the nature of individual responsibility and social risk. The First Modern Risk illuminates the implications of this conceptual revolution for the role of the state in managing problems of everyday life, transforming understandings about both the obligations and rights of individuals. Drawing on a wide array of disciplines including law, history, and politics, Moses offers a fascinating transnational view of a pivotal moment in the evolution of the welfare state.

Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'

Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure' PDF Author: Anne Stiles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108830943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Examination into how the new religious movement known as New Thought or "mind cure" influenced fin-de-siècle Anglophone children's fiction.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910 PDF Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845975
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science PDF Author: Matthew Rowlinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009409956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Centring on Darwin and on literature throughout the nineteenth century, this book documents a general crisis in the species concept.