You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Taking a biographical casebook approach, this study examines four women writers of natural history who traveled between the 1790s and 1890s. Focusing on the travel writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley, four women who primarily traveled alone, Solitary Travelers asks what sort of rhetorical strategies were used by women to move popularly accessible travel accounts into the scientific, professional sphere during a time when opportunities for women to engage in natural history field work became more and more restricted.
This collection brings together new articles by leading scholars who reappraise George Eliot in her bicentenary year as an interdisciplinary thinker and writer for our times. Here, researchers, students, teachers and the general public gain access to new perspectives on Eliot’s vast interests and knowledge, informed by the nineteenth-century British culture in which she lived. Examining Eliot’s wide-ranging engagement with Victorian historical research, periodicals, poetry, mythology, natural history, realism, the body, gender relations, and animal studies, these essays construct an exciting new interdisciplinary agenda for future Eliot studies.
Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience explores the disturbing sustainability of White male supremacy. Kramp traces an imaginative failure and an imaginative success; his focus on British speculative fiction published between 1870 and 1900 demonstrates how even this elastic and wildly inventive literary form remains incapable of promoting non- patriarchal masculinity, and he attributes this inability to the creative resiliency of white male supremacy. He demonstrates the inventive use of diverse resources that we frequently view as custom or uncomplicated history and a versatility that we often dismiss as sheer power. He draws on an archive of late nineteenth- century speculative fiction to deta...
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.
This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between ...
Bazaar Literature reorients our understanding of Victorian social reform fiction by reading it in light of the copious amount of literature generated for charity bazaars. Bazaars were ubiquitous during the nineteenth century, part of the vibrant and massive private sector response to a rapidly industrializing society. Typically organized and run by women, charity bazaars were often called "fancy fairs" since they specialized in ladies' hand-crafted "fancy" work. Indeed, they were a key method women used to intervene in political, social, and cultural affairs. Yet their conventional purpose--to raise money for charity--has led to their being widely overlooked and misunderstood. Bazaar Literat...
Although Cultural Studies has directed sustained attacks against sexism and racism, the question of the animal has lagged behind developments in broader society with regard to animal suffering in factory farming, product testing, and laboratory experimentation, as well in zoos, rodeos, circuses, and public aquariums. The contributors to Animal Subjects are scholars and writers from diverse perspectives whose work calls into question the boundaries that divide the animal kingdom from humanity, focusing on the medical, biological, cultural, philosophical, and ethical concerns between non-human animals and ourselves. The first of its kind to feature the work of Canadian scholars and writers in this emergent field, this collection aims to include the non-human-animal question as part of the ethical purview of Cultural Studies and to explore the question in interdisciplinary terms.
The rhetoric surrounding Empire, freedom, and adventure are nowhere more striking than in nineteenth-century British women’s travel writing. The Right Sort of Woman charts the progression of British feminism in relationship to exploration of the Empire. Precious McKenzie introduces us to the lesser known writings of Florence Douglas Dixie, Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond, and Isabel Savory, and also revisits the more widely read travel texts of Isabella Bird Bishop and Mary Kingsley. Their travel writings explore the hotly debated Victorian ideologies of femininity, equality, and fitness. McKenzie contends that British women travel writers found opportunities for freedom when traveling abroad. Women travelers could participate in what were traditionally men’s sports – hunting, riding, canoeing, shooting, mountaineering – when far away from strict Victorian social codes of behavior. Because of their athletic pursuits while abroad, British women travelers found their health improved as did their self-reliance and self-confidence. McKenzie considers how sports shaped the British feminist movement and then became integral to the revolutionary image of the New Woman at the fin de siècle.
Mathematics has maintained a surprising presence in popular media for over a century. In recent years, the movies Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, the stage plays Breaking the Code and Proof, the novella Flatland and the hugely successful television crime series NUMB3RS all weave mathematics prominently into their storylines. Less obvious but pivotal references to the subject appear in the blockbuster TV show Lost, the cult movie The Princess Bride, and even Tolstoy's War and Peace. In this collection of new essays, contributors consider the role of math in everything from films, baseball, crossword puzzles, fantasy role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction tales, award-winning plays and classic works of literature. Revealing the broad range of intersections between mathematics and mainstream culture, this collection demonstrates that even "mass entertainment" can have a hidden depth.