Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination PDF Author: Carol T. Christ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520200227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
"Looks freshly at facts that have remained marginal to most critics' sense of the literature--the sheer mechanism of artistic and literary reproductions. These essays make an unusual, various, and interesting collection, with appeal to a great many constituencies."--George Levine, author of Darwin and the Novelists "This is an exciting collection linked by a series of contemporary critical assumptions and Victorian concerns. . . . For all their reconsideration of theory, the essays are written in a lively, jargon-free style that should give them popular as well as scholarly appeal."--Carole Silver, coeditor of Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris

Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination PDF Author: Carol T. Christ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520200227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Looks freshly at facts that have remained marginal to most critics' sense of the literature--the sheer mechanism of artistic and literary reproductions. These essays make an unusual, various, and interesting collection, with appeal to a great many constituencies."--George Levine, author of Darwin and the Novelists "This is an exciting collection linked by a series of contemporary critical assumptions and Victorian concerns. . . . For all their reconsideration of theory, the essays are written in a lively, jargon-free style that should give them popular as well as scholarly appeal."--Carole Silver, coeditor of Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris

The Victorians and the Visual Imagination

The Victorians and the Visual Imagination PDF Author: Kate Flint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521770262
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination PDF Author: Peter H. Hoffenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317086198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Oceania, or the South Pacific, loomed large in the Victorian popular imagination. It was a world that interested the Victorians for many reasons, all of which suggested to them that everything was possible there. This collection of essays focuses on Oceania’s impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children. Each of these had significant impact. The literature discussed affected mainly the middle and upper classes, while exhibitions and photography reached down into the working classes, as did missionary presentations. The experience of children was central to the Pacific’s effects, as youthful encounters at exhibitions, chapel, home, or school formed lifelong impressions and experience. It would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their engagement with Oceania. While the contributions of India and Africa to the nineteenth-century imagination have been well-documented, examinations of the contributions of Oceania have remained on the periphery of Victorian studies. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination contributes significantly to our discussion of the non-peripheral place of Oceania in Victorian culture.

Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination

Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination PDF Author: Leila Neti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108950744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.

Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture

Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Galia Ofek
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754661610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Examining a wide range of historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical works, Galia Ofek shows how changing patterns of power relations between women and patriarchy are rendered anew when viewed through the lens of Victorian hair codes and imagery during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her innovative study reveals the Victorians' well-developed awareness of fetishism and their cognizance of hair's symbolic resonance and commercial value.

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477593
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.

Second sight

Second sight PDF Author: Catherine Maxwell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847794866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second Sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.

Antipodal England

Antipodal England PDF Author:
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438427182
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description


Victorian Glassworlds

Victorian Glassworlds PDF Author: Isobel Armstrong
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191607126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 879

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Book Description
Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

The Victorian Freak Show

The Victorian Freak Show PDF Author: Lillian Craton
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604976535
Category : Literary Criticism & Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.