Bøger i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture serien

Provides an reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. This book examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures.

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 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

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.

Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable yearOscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

The great polymath William Morris and his contemporaries and followers - from H. Rider Haggard to H. G. Wells - are the focus of this study. Anna Vaninskaya draws widely on primary sources to explore the many ways Victorians and Edwardians talked about community and modernity.

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