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The 1840s, 50s, and 60s: three decades during which the British feminist movement saw some of its most intense activity of the nineteenth-century, and readers find some of the most monstrous, troubling representations of women by male writers in all of literary history. In Fixing Patriarchy, Donald E. Hall suggests that feminism at mid-century posed intertwined social, economic, political and psychological threats to patriarchy. Hall explores the metamorphic nature of Victorian definitions of masculinity and femininity through an analysis of male authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley, Thackeray, Hughes, Collins, and Trollope in dialogue with Victorian feminists and other women writers.Synthesizing historical research with pertinent queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories, Hall locates both startling admissions of moral fallibility and violent strategies of retrenchment and containment of this perceived threat to the male social body. Fixing Patriarchytraces parallels among Victorian discourses of religion, science, economics, and aesthetics, as it explores a cultural dynamic of un-fixedness and heightened desires for fixity.
An exploration of cuteness and its immense hold on us, from emojis and fluffy puppies to its more uncanny, subversive expressions Cuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T.—all reflect its gathering power. But what does “cute” mean, as a sensibility and style? Why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or is there something more uncanny and even menacing going on—in a lighthearted way? In The Power of Cute, Simon May provides nuanced and surprising answers. We usually see the cute as merely diminutive, harmless, and helpless. May challenges this...
An exploration of cuteness and its immense hold on us, from emojis and fluffy puppies to its more uncanny, subversive expressions Cuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T.—all reflect its gathering power. But what does “cute” mean, as a sensibility and style? Why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or is there something more uncanny and even menacing going on—in a lighthearted way? In The Power of Cute, Simon May provides nuanced and surprising answers. We usually see the cute as merely diminutive, harmless, and helpless. May challenges this...
Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McE...
The modern world is faced with a terrifying new ‘disease’, that of ‘obesity’. As people get fatter, we have come to see excess weight as unhealthy, morally repugnant and socially damaging. Fat it seems has long been a national problem and each age, culture and tradition have all defined a point beyond which excess weight is unacceptable, ugly or corrupting. This fascinating new book by Sander Gilman looks at the interweaving of fact and fiction about obesity, tracing public concern from the mid-nineteenth century to the modern day. He looks critically at the source of our anxieties, covering issues such as childhood obesity, the production of food, media coverage of the subject and t...
Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.
The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.
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 in ...
This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian "periods" that have so often been rather read as differences, the book demonstrates that the sublime mode enables the transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle class is normally seen as beautiful, the book contends that the moral authority given to this icon of depth and interiority is actually sublime. T...
This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.