You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This interdisciplinary study of legal and literary narratives argues that the novel's particular power to represent the interior life of its characters both challenges the law's definitions of criminal responsibility and reaffirms them. By means of connecting major novelists with prominent jurists and legal historians of the era, it offers profound new ways of thinking about the Victorian period.
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.
This interdisciplinary study of legal and literary narratives argues that the novel's particular power to represent the interior life of its characters both challenges the law's definitions of criminal responsibility and reaffirms them. By means of connecting major novelists with prominent jurists and legal historians of the era, it offers profound new ways of thinking about the Victorian period.
The poems collected in this volume are expressions of a spirit of self-indulgence, eroticism and moral rebelliousness that emerged in the late Victorian age. They deal with eternal themes of transition, artifice and the ravages of time. It presents the works of writers as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and W B Yeats.
Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. Flegel considers a wide range of well-known and more obscure texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, including philosophical writings by Locke and Rousseau, poetry by Coleridge, Blake, and Caroline Norton, works by journalists and reformers like Henry Mayhew and Mary Carpenter, and novels by Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Morrison. Taking up crucial topi...
Reading major novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, Common Precedents shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in the nineteenth-century as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values, and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous society. Enabling the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past, Ayelet Ben-Yishai argues that the binding force of precedent also functions as the binding element of an always shifting commonality, pulling it together in the face of rupture and dispersion. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, the form of legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture. But the impact of precedent extended beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large, and especially to its fiction. Ben-Yishai argues that understanding the structure of precedent also explains fictional form: how fictionality works, its epistemology, and the ways in which its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified.
Critical analysis of the magazines established and edited by Charles Dickens.
Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments—from free indirect discourse to first-person narration—in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body i...
A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.