How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

A Reference Guide for English Studies

A Reference Guide for English Studies PDF Author: Michael J. Marcuse
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520321871
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2816

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Book Description


The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199533148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Victorian Biography Reconsidered

Victorian Biography Reconsidered PDF Author: Juliette Atkinson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191591432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In 1939, Virginia Woolf called for a more inclusive form of biography, which would include 'the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious'. She did so in part as a reaction against Victorian biography, deemed to have been overly preoccupied with 'Great Men'. Yet a significant number of Victorians had already broken ranks to write the lives of humble, unsuccessful, or neglected men and women. Victorian Biography Reconsidered seeks to uncover and assess this trend. The book begins with an overview of Victorian biography followed by a reflection on how the bagginess of nineteenth-century hero-worship enabled new subjects to emerge. Biographies of 'hidden' lives are then scrutinized through chapters on the lives of humble naturalists, failed destinies, minor women writers, neglected Romantic poets rescued by Victorian biographers, and, finally, the Dictionary of National Biography. In its conclusion, the book briefly discusses how Virginia Woolf absorbed earlier biographical trends before redirecting the representation of 'hidden' lives. Victorian Biography Reconsidered argues that, often paradoxically, nineteenth-century biographers regarded the public sphere with intense wariness. At a time of instability for men of letters, biographers embraced the role of mediators in a manner that asserted their own cultural authority. Frequently, they showed little interest in vouchsafing immortality for their unknown or forgotten subjects, but strove instead to provoke amongst their readers a feeling of gratitude for the hidden labour that sustained the nation and an appreciation for the writers who had brought it to their attention.

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale PDF Author: C. Sumpter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230227643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Philip Steer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.

Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature for the Ten Years 1945-1954

Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature for the Ten Years 1945-1954 PDF Author: Austin Wright
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature for the Ten Years 1955-1964

Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature for the Ten Years 1955-1964 PDF Author: Modern Language Association of America. Victorian Literature Group
Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description


The Victorian Novel in Context

The Victorian Novel in Context PDF Author: Grace Moore
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847064892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Structured in 3-parts, this book focuses on immediate contexts, key texts, and wider contexts enables development from background issues through the actual literary texts to criticism and afterlives.

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521591414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.