Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society PDF Author: Sue Zemka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139503073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Sudden changes, opportunities, or revelations have always carried a special significance in Western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments, events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society PDF Author: Sue Zemka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139503073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sudden changes, opportunities, or revelations have always carried a special significance in Western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments, events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.

The Victorians

The Victorians PDF Author: Laurence Lerner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
How closely was the social reality of Victorian England reflected in the vivid picture evoked by its literature? In this survey of the Victorian era the relation between literature and society is explained by means of three distinct sections. The first delineates the literary history in two chapters on the Victorian novel and Victorian poetry respectively. In the second and largest section a series of essays discuss various fundamental aspects of Victorian society: the economic and social framework, government and institutions, the sense of the past, painting and illustration, religion and the role of women. The third section offers two essays which explicitly relate a particular work to the society: one on Dickens' Dombey and Son, and the other on Tennyson's 'The Princess'. By turning to each essay after the rounded picture of Victorian society given in the previous sections, the reader will not only find his appreciation enhanced, but will also be enabled to argue back on equal terms in a way that is never possible with a survey of literature alone.

Literature, Society, and Ideology in the Victorian Era

Literature, Society, and Ideology in the Victorian Era PDF Author: Jasodhara Bagchi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description


The Presence of the Present

The Presence of the Present PDF Author: Richard Daniel Altick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description


The Victorian Period

The Victorian Period PDF Author: Robin Gilmour
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317871316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This is a thought-provoking synthesis of the Victorian period, focusing on the themes of science, religion, politics and art. It examines the developments which radically changed the intellectual climate and illustrates how their manifestations permeated Victorian literature. The author begins by establishing the social and institutional framework in which intellectual and cultural life developed. Special attention is paid to the reform agenda of new groups which challenged traditional society, and this perspective informs Gilmour's discussion throughout the book. He assesses Victorian religion, science and politics in their own terms and in relation to the larger cultural politics of the middle-class challenge to traditionalism. Familiar topics, such as the Oxford Movement and Darwinism, are seen afresh, and those once neglected areas which are now increasingly important to modern scholars are brought into clear focus, such as Victorian agnosticism, the politics of gender, 'Englishness', and photography. The most innovative feature of this compelling study is the prominence given to the contemporary preoccupation with time. The Victorians' time-hauntedness emerges as the defining feature of their civilisation - the remote time of geology and evolution, the public time of history, the private time of autobiography.

Anxious Times

Anxious Times PDF Author: Amelia Bonea
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986604
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.

Victorian Hands

Victorian Hands PDF Author: Peter J. Capuano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Focuses on the materiality of hands to show the role that the hand plays in Victorian literature and culture.

Too Much

Too Much PDF Author: Rachel Vorona Cote
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538729717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

Dickens's England

Dickens's England PDF Author: R. E. Pritchard
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752475541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Dickens's England was a time of unprecedented energy and change which laid the foundations of our own modern society. There was a new world coming into being: new towns, new machines, new and revolutionary ideas, new songs and dances, music-halls and popular novels, as well as new wealth for the smug middle classes. For others, however, there was poverty, struggle and hard labour. Dickens's characters with whom we are so familiar - orphan Oliver and cunning Fagin, snobbish Pip, spendthrift Mr Micawber, pompous Podsnap and humourless Gradgrind - grow out of his own observation. Here, Dickens and his great contemporaries - John Ruskin, Henry Mayhew, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy - take us into the heart of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called 'this live, throbbing age, that brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires'. This is the perfect book for anyone wanting to understand more about the world of our great novelist Charles Dickens.

 PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198929226
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description