You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
At the height of his career, writing short stories provided Dickens with a release from the formal constraints of his novels and gave free reign to his creative imagination. Ranging from "flights of fancy" to literary masterpieces, Dickens's short stories contained artistic experiments that inspired fuller developments in his novels. Yet the short stories have been all but overlooked in critical discussions. Deborah A. Thomas focuses directly on this body of work, tracing three stages of development. In the early stage until 1840, Dickens produced numerous short stories, culminating in his experience with the abortive Master Humphrey's Clock. In the following ten years, he restricted his wri...
A fascinating journey through the origins of American tourism In the early nineteenth century, thanks to a booming transportation industry, Americans began to journey away from home simply for the sake of traveling, giving rise to a new cultural phenomenon —the tourist. In Selling the Sights, Will B. Mackintosh describes the origins and cultural significance of this new type of traveler and the moment in time when the emerging American market economy began to reshape the availability of geographical knowledge, the material conditions of travel, and the variety of destinations that sought to profit from visitors with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to transform the critical steps of travel—deciding where to go and how to get there—into commodities that could be produced in volume and sold to a marketplace of consumers. The identities of Americans prosperous enough to afford such commodities were fundamentally changed as they came to define themselves through the consumption of experiences. Mackintosh ultimately demonstrates that the cultural values and market forces surrounding tourism in the early nineteenth century continue to shape our experience of travel to this day.
None
In 1858, Rosina Bulwer Lytton was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by her husband, the eminent Victorian politician and novelist, Edward Bulwer Lytton. After the disintegration of their marriage, Rosina wrote letters to prominent figures in which she revealed details about Edward's mistresses and illegitimate children.
Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood examines Charles Dickens’ weekly family magazine Household Words in order to develop a detailed picture of how the journal negotiated, asserted and simultaneously deconstructed Englishness as a unified (and sometimes unifying) mode of expression. It offers close readings of a wide range of materials that self-consciously focus on the nature of England as well as the relationship between Britain and the European continent, Ireland, and the British colonies. Starting with the representation and classification of identities that took place within the framework of the Great Exhibition of 1851, it suggests that the journal strives for a model of the world in concentric circles, spiraling outward from the metropolitan center of London. Despite this apparent orderliness, however, each of the national or regional categories constructed by the journal also resists and undermines such a clear-cut representation.