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Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Sie
This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of ‘needs’ to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Draw...
Dickens and Modernity
Essays exploring the ways in which Dickens' vision is both so much of its time, and yet has so much resonance for today. The scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth is testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary authors the world has ever seen. Yet Dickens has also become associated in the public imagination with a particular version of the Victorian past and with respectability. His continued cultural prominence and the "brand recognition" achieved by his image and images suggest that his vision reaches out beyond the Victorianperiod. Yet what is the relationship between Dickens and the modern world? Do his works offer a consoling version of th...
Queer Victorian Families
The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.
Chains of Love and Beauty
Why a monumental diary by an aunt and niece who published poetry together as “Michael Field”—and who were partners and lovers for decades—is one of the great unknown works of late-Victorian and early modernist literature Michael Field, the renowned late-Victorian poet, was well known to be the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Less well known is that for three decades, the women privately maintained a romantic relationship and kept a double diary, sharing the page as they shared a bed and eventually producing a 9,500-page, twenty-nine-volume story of love, life, and art in the fin de siècle. In Chains of Love and Beauty, the firs...
Before Queer Theory
A reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory. Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its "art for art's sake" rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being qu...
Queer Kinship after Wilde
Focuses on figures who saw themselves as part of a Decadent tradition as they revised the concept of the family in the early 20th century.
Changing the Victorian Subject
The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.
The Unknown Relatives
The Unknown Relatives analyzes a large body of Victorian literary texts dealing with the topic of Catholicism and Catholics, written from the non-Catholic perspective. The readings of these texts are inspired by psychoanalytic criticism, primarily by the work of Freud and Kristeva and includes the readings of a number of Victorian authors, both canonical like Charlotte Bronté, William Thackeray, and Charles Dickens and lesser-known ones such as George Borrow, John Shorthouse, and Mrs Humphry Ward.
Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture
Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Vic...
