Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030753972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030753972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book

Book Description
This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030753986
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products 'as they are' and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces.

Victorian Skin

Victorian Skin PDF Author: Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science

Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science PDF Author: David Sweeney Coombs
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

Victorian Literature and Culture

Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Maureen Moran
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441169873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This guide to Victorian Literature and Culture provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from 1837-1900, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background including politics and economics, popular culture, philosophy - major writers and genres including the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Trollope, Thackeray, Conan Doyle, Ibsen, Shaw, Hopkins, Rossetti and Tennyson - concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism - key critical approaches - a chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further reading including websites and electronic resources.

Reading Victorian Fiction

Reading Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Andrew Blake
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349197688
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
A study of the interrelationship of the Victorian novel with other forms of writings, arguing that the whole literary culture was concerned with the production of Victorian values, including novels, an active part in the compromise between aristocratic and middle class cultures in this period.

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time PDF Author: Christine L. Krueger
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821414607
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Annotation The echoes of Victorian literature and culture impact contemporary practices and values, according to Krueger (English, Marquette U.). She presents 11 essays that address such issues as the problematics of temporality in the historiography of Victorian times, the reproduction of Victorian material culture for contemporary consumers, the use of Victorian cultural identities in fashioning today's identities, and the persistence of Victorian methods of legal and social discipline. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Anne DeWitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Anne DeWitt examines how Victorian novelists challenged the claims of men of science to align scientific practice with moral excellence.

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: 1400842182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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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 New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture

A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781118624425
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new companion surveys seven decades of history.