Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Author: Will Abberley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1108807542

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Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.

Victorian Material Culture
Victorian Material Culture

Author: Tatiana Kontou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-07-14

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1315399962

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From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, ‘Fashionable Things’, will focus on Victorian fads and fashions ranging from chatelains to insect jewellery.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction
Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Author: Matthew Sussman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1108967248

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An innovative approach to literary stylistic analysis that targets students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture through provocative interpretations of style in Victorian novels and succinct revaluations of major figures in rhetoric, criticism, and philosophy.

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages
Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Author: Eavan O'Dochartaigh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1108834337

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Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany
Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany

Author: Linda Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1316512843

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A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry
Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

Author: Francesca Mackenney

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1009084089

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In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910
Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Author: Dennis Denisoff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1108998348

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Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.