You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The legacy of Romantic historicism, the professionalization of the historical discipline, and even the growth of social history, all heightened the stakes. This book brings together Victorian histories and novels to show how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. Many historians shrank from engaging with controversial recent events. This study showcases the work of those rare historians who defied convention, including the polymath Harriet Martineau, English nationalist J. R. Green, and liberal enthusiast Spencer Walpole. A striking number of popular Victorian novels are retrospective. This book argues that Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot’s “novels of the recent past” are long overdue recognition as genuinely historical novels. By focusing on provincial communities, these novelists reveal undercurrents invisible to national narratives, and intervene in debates about women’s contribution to history.
This collection explores generational studies, showcasing its interdisciplinary potential in sociology, literature, history, psychology, media studies and politics. It offers fresh perspectives and opens new avenues for generational thinking.
The Victorian era is famous for the collecting, hording, and displaying of things; for the mass production and consumption of things; for the invention, distribution and sale of things; for those who had things, and those who did not. For many people, the Victorian period is intrinsically associated with paraphernalia. This collection of essays explores the Victorians through their materiality, and asks how objects were part of being Victorian; which objects defined them, represented them, were uniquely theirs; and how reading the Victorians, through their possessions, can deepen our understanding of Victorian culture. Miscellaneous and often auxiliary, paraphernalia becomes the ‘disjecta...
Studies 'seriality' in nineteenth-century literary and popular print culture, focusing on literacy and the material history of reading in the period from 1815 to 1848.
The first history of the West End of London, showing how the nineteenth-century growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry shaped modern culture and consumer society, and made London a world centre of entertainment and glamour.
Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue-The Forgotten Story of Ecce Homo -- Chapter One-Authority and Authorship -- Chapter Two-By the Author of Essays on the Church -- Chapter Three-Father and Son -- Chapter Four-The Victorian Jesus -- Chapter Five-A Dangerous Book -- Chapter Six-Vomited from the Jaws of Hell -- Chapter Seven-A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing -- Chapter Eight-Shrewd Conjecture -- Chapter Nine-White Lies -- Chapter Ten-Behold the Man -- Chapter Eleven-Behold the Historian -- Chapter Twelve-Fulfilling a Promise -- Chapter Thirteen-By the Author of Ecce Homo -- Chapter Fourteen-Remembering the Author of Ecce Homo -- Epilogue-Anonymous Publishing and Universal History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Studies in Book and Print Culture
George Eliot repeatedly stressed the aesthetic and ethical importance of viewing subjects from different perspectives: The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot presents fifty-two perspectives on this major nineteenth-century writer. Together, the chapters provide the most wide-ranging collection of essays on Eliot's life and works published to date. While providing fresh perspectives on the important themes running through Eliot's works, the volume is distinctive in placing a concern with literary form at its heart. Part I questions longstanding conceptions of Eliot as a figure isolated by scandal by exploring her personal and intellectual relationships with her contemporaries. Part II focuses on...
What constitutes a historian? What skills and qualities should a historian cultivate? Who is entitled to define historians’ “physiognomy”? Victorians sought to answer these questions as history transformed from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century. This book offers a novel interpretation of this critical historiographical period by tracing how historians forged themselves a collective scholarly persona that legitimized their new disciplinary status. By combining historiography and book history, Elise Garritzen argues that historians appropriated titles, prefaces, footnotes, and other paratexts as an institutionalized spac...
The Victorian Novel On File argues that the nineteenth-century information explosion shapes the novel form. In a world teeming with data, the novel is a storage medium, cluttered with detail and accumulating more than it can use. The fictional things that have been read as insignificant should be seen instead as vessels of information, embedding the text with potential. This study weaves together a formal account of the novel with media and information studies as well as new materialist approaches to objects. Information took material form in the nineteenth century: in Victorian literature, data can be located in bric-a-brac, folded-up papers, semi-precious stones, and rubbish heaps. Yet thi...