Bøger i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture serien

This book highlights the integral relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer and the expansion and diversification of newspaper, book and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change, 1832 1860.

Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture' assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory.

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres (the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel) using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction, Lady Audley's Secret, as a starting point

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the 'crisis in gender' or 'sexual anarchy' of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

This book analyses how Victorian novels and plays used the actress, a significant figure for the relationship between women and the public sphere, to define their own place within and among genres and in relation to audiences.

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? 'Artful Experiments' seeks to approach the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge.

The Victorian Male Body' examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality.

Without a consideration of periodical poetry, Victorian poetry studies is quite simply anachronistic

This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items.

Examines the full stylistic range of the novels and biographies which Trollope explored in his final decade

Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, Nasser examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

Self-Harm in New Woman Writing offers a trans-disciplinary study of Victorian literature, culture and medicine through engagement with the recurrent trope of self-harm in writing by and about the British New Woman.

This study explores lyric poetry's response to a crisis of relevance in Victorian Modernity, offering an analysis of literature usually elided by studies of the modern formation of the genre and uncovering previously unrecognized discourses within it.

Explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as it is advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde's early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters. Key Features The first monograph study to focus exclusively on Decadent poetry Gives original attention to Oscar Wilde's poetry which has been relatively neglected Makes an explicit distinction between 'Aestheticism' and 'Decadence' Includes a Coda which considers how this Decadent poetics transmutes in Modernism. Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His main research specialisms are fin-de-sicle literature and culture, Decadence and Aestheticism, and Anglo-Continental literary transactions. He is a co-editor of The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and, with Mark Sandy, of the forthcoming essay collection Decadent Romanticism (Ashgate, 2015). He has published articles on late Victorian and Modernist topics.

Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de sicle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period. Key Features:Boldly reassesses Pater's intellectual significance, arguing that he self-consciously poised on the cusp between late-Victorian Romanticism and ModernismImaginatively combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'Provides the most substantial scholarly engagement with Pater's unpublished manuscripts (held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Examines the Reading Room of the British Museum as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room, Roomscape is the first study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that uphold this spatial conceit. Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, Roomscape considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production. In addition to new perspectives on George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Virginia Woolf, Roomscape offers original research on other novelists, poets, and translators including Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Looking at the Reading Room of the British Museum as a networking site for a variety of readers, this study examines political radicals and women activists who found a transnational community in this London public space. An appendix of notable readers lists details of more than 200 women readers who registered for admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.

Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in a period of heightened mobility Women's experiences of locomotion during a period of increased physical mobility and urbanisation are explored in this monograph. The 5 chapters analyse Victorian and early Modernist texts which concentrate on women in transit by train, including Wilkie Collins's No Name, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton and The Wings of the Dove, and stories by Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens and Katherine Mansfield. They highlight the tension between women's boundless physical, emotional, and sexual aspiration - often depicted as closely related to the freedom and speed of train travel - and Victorian gender ideology which constructed the spaces of the railway as geographies of fear or manipulation. Key features: The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and philosophical writings Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary

Provides an innovative approach to articulate what 'underground' meant to the Victorians The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of mile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This study explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but as a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way in which these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals both the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, and the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable. The inclusion of illustrations of Victorian maps, cartoons, photographs and art bring the period to life. Key Features: An interdisciplinary study that explores Victorian maps, guidebooks, cartoons and advertisements, alongside literature, journals, photographs and art to bring the period to lifeDraws on modern critical frameworks of Derrida, Lefebvre, and Kristeva to recover and to conceptualize the lost spaces of the Victorian cityRedefines 'underground' beyond its spatial usage to look at the emergence of underground revolutionary movements in fin-de-sicle LondonArgues for the distinctiveness of London's underground culture and its influence on other global cities

"e;Examines the moving image in relation to nineteenth-century literature, theories of mind, and visual media This book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typical of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind."e;

This phenomenological exploration of the streets of Dickens's London opens up new perspectives on the city and the writer.Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as an inspiration, Dickens's London offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - Dickens's novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from Dickens's interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens's London presents in twenty-six episodes (from Banking and Breakfast via the Insolvent Court, Melancholy and Poverty, to Todgers and Time, Voice and Waking) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both.Key Features* Major reassessment of Dickens's writing on the city * Dual focus on methodology and the historicity of Dickensian urban consciousness* Philosophical reflections on urban tropologies through key passages from Dickens's texts recreate the experience of Victorian London * Inventive structure offers the reader an experience of the disordered multiplicity of London* Illustrated with 19 maps and photographs

Explores the fin de siecle mission to open up the 'Dark Continent'This study maps the effects of a cartographic blankness in literature and its impact upon early Modernist culture, through the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis and the debt that Freud owed to African exploration. It demonstrates that tales of intrepid exploration and of dramatic cultural encounters between indigenous populations - often serialised in missionary magazines - had a profound influence on every facet of late Victorian and early Modernist culture. As Robbie McLaughlan shows, this influence manifested itself most clearly in the late Victorian 'best-seller' which blended this arcane Central African imagery with an interest in psychic phenomena. The chapters examine: representations of unexplored regions in missionary writing and Rider Haggard's narratives on Africa; the cartographic tradition in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections; and mesmeric fiction, such as Richard Marsh's The Beetle, Robert Buchanan's The Charlatan and George du Maurier's Trilby.Key Features:* Opens up the 'dark continent' and its literary, historical and theoretical manifestations* Argues for an anticipation of a modernist aesthetic suggesting an unexplored relation between fin de sicle sensation literature, in particular mesmeric fiction, and psychoanalysis* Diverges from established colonial histories by drawing on an archive of special and neglected material

By connecting Fenian and anarchist violence found in popular fiction from the 1880s to the early 1900s with the avant-garde writing of British modernism, Deaglan Donghaile demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and modernism were directly influenced by the explosive shocks of late nineteenth-century terrorism. For the first time, late-Victorian 'dynamite novels', radical journalism and modernist writing are brought together in provocative readings of Henry James, R L Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Wyndham Lewis. Key Features*Extensive original archival research from libraries in the UK, Ireland and the US*The first book to examine types of political and literary disruption*Reads Henry James, R L Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in new contexts *Detailed discussion of Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde Vorticist journal BLAST in chapter 4

British India and Victorian Literary Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India. The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century through the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Emma Roberts, Philip Meadows Taylor and Rudyard Kipling. Key events and concerns of Victorian India the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian 'Mutiny', the sati controversy, the rise of Bengal nationalism - are re-assessed within a dual literary and political context, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings. N Fhlathin examines representations of the experience of being in India, in chapters on the poetry and prose of exile, and the dynamics of consumption. She also analyses colonial representations of the landscape and societies of India itself, in chapters on the figure of the bandit / hero, female agency and self-sacrifice, and the use of historiography to enlist indigenous narratives in the project of Empire.Description and analysis of the literary marketplace and periodical press, both previously neglectedReassessment of some works of Kipling in the context of a long-standing literary tradition of British IndiaNew analysis of the interactions of metropolitan and colonial literary cultures, and the impact of canonical texts on peripheral marketplacesExamination of Victorian concepts of the colonial relationship in the light of both important writers of British India (Kipling, Meadow Taylor) and others previously unstudiedMire n Fhlathin is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty.

Dickens and Demolition examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens' fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime.

Argues against the repeated emphasis on literary form and for the artistic importance of literary contentIt is natural to assume that if works of literature are artistically valuable, it's not because of anything they say but because of what they are: beautiful. Works of art try to say nothing, to use their content only as matter for realizing the beauty of complex form. But what if appreciating the things a work of literature has to say is a way of appreciating it as a work of art? Often dismissed as too lengthy, messy, and preachy to qualify as genuine art, in fact Victorian narrative challenges our conceptions about what makes art worth engaging.Key Features. Appeals to those interested in philosophy and literature, especially the philosophy of literature. Brings together thinkers from the analytic and continental traditions in aesthetics. Contains an updated and expanded version of the award-winning essay 'In Defence of Paraphrase'. Makes a case for why Victorian literature and Victorian moral thought are worthy of attention. Offers new readings of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Augusta WebsterPatrick Fessenbecker is Assistant Professor, Programme in Cultures, Civilisations and Ideas at Bilkent University.

Uncovers the link between Ruskin and the tradition of the aesthetics of space Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin's ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period. Giles Whiteley is Reader in English Literature at Stockholm University.

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality.