Sex and Death in Victorian Literature

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Regina Barreca
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349102806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Sex and Death in Victorian Literature is a landmark collection of 13 previously unpublished essays on nineteenth-century British poetry, fiction and prose by the most important English and American scholars in the field. The volume observes the subject from an unusually wide variety of viewpoints, including historical, sociological, psychoanalytic, feminist and mythological. There are works central and peripheral to the traditional Victorian canon discussed in Sex and Death; as such the essays present an unprecedented perspective on the shifts and movements of nineteenth-century literature. By grouping the essays under the aegis of sexuality and morality, the volume allows the authors to explore the most important aspects of the works they discuss.

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Regina Barreca
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349102806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sex and Death in Victorian Literature is a landmark collection of 13 previously unpublished essays on nineteenth-century British poetry, fiction and prose by the most important English and American scholars in the field. The volume observes the subject from an unusually wide variety of viewpoints, including historical, sociological, psychoanalytic, feminist and mythological. There are works central and peripheral to the traditional Victorian canon discussed in Sex and Death; as such the essays present an unprecedented perspective on the shifts and movements of nineteenth-century literature. By grouping the essays under the aegis of sexuality and morality, the volume allows the authors to explore the most important aspects of the works they discuss.

Death at the Priory

Death at the Priory PDF Author: James Ruddick
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802139740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Details the unsolved murder of successful attorney Charles Bravo, a cruel man who tormented his wife Florence, in a mystery that paints a portrait of Victorian culture and one woman's fight to exist in this repressive society.

Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature

Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Lloyd Davis
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791412831
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book examines the figure of the virgin, a symbol central to many aspects of society and sexuality in nineteenth-century England, and its effects on the Victorian literary imagination. Studying the virgin as a social, sexual, and literary phenomenon, the volume contributes to current critical accounts of the relations among the body and language, gender, and discourse. These essays explore the ways in which virginity is not a natural ideal but a complex cultural and literary sign. The authors rethink the virginal as a textual counter-example to the idealization of "natural sexuality."

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Deborah Lutz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107077443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England PDF Author: Pamela K. Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429676999
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain

Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Violet Fenn
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526756692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
“Dull this book is not, and it gives an insight into the many scandals not spoken about in polite Victorian drawing rooms.” —Glasgow & West of Scotland Family History Society Peek beneath the bedsheets of nineteenth-century Britain in this affectionate, informative and fascinating look at sex and sexuality during the reign of Queen Victoria. It examines the prevailing attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior, and the ways in which these attitudes were often determined by those in positions of power and authority. It also explores our ancestors’ ingenious, surprising, bizarre and often entertaining solutions to the challenges associated with maintaining a healthy sex life. Did the people in Victorian times live up to their stereotypes when it came to sexual behavior? This book will answer this question, as well as looking at fashion, food, science, art, medicine, magic, literature, love, politics, faith and superstition through a new lens, leaving the reader uplifted and with a new regard for the ingenuity and character of our great-great-grandparents. “I would say this book gives you the information on relationships, genders and very much behavior that doesn’t usually come across in history books. Therefore this is an excellent book indeed, certainly one that more people should be aware of and learn from.” —UK Historian “The writing is joyous and it is clear the author enjoys her subject and is fairly knowledgeable on things Victorian.” —Rosie Writes “Fenn’s writing is so readable and it’s clear this is a book written by a historian who loves her subject and is very knowledgeable about the research being carried out by other historians.” —Jessticulates

The Good Death

The Good Death PDF Author: Ann Neumann
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807076996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neumann’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver—cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying. Neumann struggled to put her life back in order and found herself haunted by a question: Was her father’s death a good death? The way we talk about dying and the way we actually die are two very different things, she discovered, and many of us are shielded from what death actually looks like. To gain a better understanding, Neumann became a hospice volunteer and set out to discover what a good death is today. She attended conferences, academic lectures, and grief sessions in church basements. She went to Montana to talk with the attorney who successfully argued for the legalization of aid in dying, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to listen to “pro-life” groups who believe the removal of feeding tubes from some patients is tantamount to murder. Above all, she listened to the stories of those who were close to death. What Neumann found is that death in contemporary America is much more complicated than we think. Medical technologies and increased life expectancies have changed the very definition of medical death. And although death is our common fate, it is also a divisive issue that we all experience differently. What constitutes a good death is unique to each of us, depending on our age, race, economic status, culture, and beliefs. What’s more, differing concepts of choice, autonomy, and consent make death a contested landscape, governed by social, medical, legal, and religious systems. In these pages, Neumann brings us intimate portraits of the nurses, patients, bishops, bioethicists, and activists who are shaping the way we die. The Good Death presents a fearless examination of how we approach death, and how those of us close to dying loved ones live in death’s wake.

Sex and Sexuality in Stuart Britain

Sex and Sexuality in Stuart Britain PDF Author: Andrea Zuvich
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526753081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
An expert in Stuart England examines the sexual lives of Britons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in this frank, informative, and revealing history. Acclaimed Stuart historian Andrea Zuvich explores the sexual mores of Stuart Britain, including surprising beliefs, bizarre practices, and ingenious solutions for infertility, impotence, sexually transmitted diseases, and more. Along the way, she reveals much about the prevailing attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior. Zuvich sheds light not only on the saucy love lives of the Royal Stuarts, but also on the dark underbelly of the Stuart era with histories of prostitution, sexual violence, infanticide, and sexual deviance. She looks at everything from what was considered sexually attractive to the penalties for adultery, incest, and fornication. Sex and Sexuality in Stuart Britain touches on the fashion, food, science, art, medicine, magic, literature, love, politics, faith and superstition of the day.

Love, Sex, Death and Words

Love, Sex, Death and Words PDF Author: Jon Sutherland
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1848312695
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Book Description
Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries. In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends Stephen Fender and John Sutherland turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer. Find out why 16 June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963 and why Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949 in this sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.

Vigor Mortis

Vigor Mortis PDF Author: Scott G. Bruce
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040299946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This volume explores the enduring presence and participation of the dead in the lives of premodern people from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike modern states, which erect barriers to separate the dying and the deceased from their families, friends, and associates, premodern societies in western Europe fostered an on-going relationship between the living and the dead that was mutually beneficial to both parties. As these studies show, the dead had many means at their disposal to communicate their needs and disaffection, including ghostly visitations and unquiet corpses. For their part, medieval authors told stories about the fate of the dead and the geography of the afterlife to dissuade sinful behaviour and foster virtue in preparation for the Last Judgment. Premodern hauntings also serve as a useful metaphor for the uncertainty of archival research in recovering past voices and for the racial presumptions that inform our reconstruction of the western Middle Ages. This book will appeal to scholars and students of history and literature, especially those interested in the concept of death in the medieval period. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Medieval History.