The essays collected here all take issue with the claim that the Victorian period is the antithesis of our own. They show how characteristic postmodern anxieties and celebrations concerning truth, certainty and identity informed Victorian culture at all levels. Covering everything from attitudes to drink to the poetry of Browning, from the Great Exhibition to the Elephant Man, this volume shows not only how the Victorians coped with these challenges but also what lessons they have for us today.
Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.
The essays collected here all take issue with the claim that the Victorian period is the antithesis of our own. They show how characteristic postmodern anxieties and celebrations concerning truth, certainty and identity informed Victorian culture at all levels. Covering everything from attitudes to drink to the poetry of Browning, from the Great Exhibition to the Elephant Man, this volume shows not only how the Victorians coped with these challenges but also what lessons they have for us today.
The importance of typology in the study of early modern literature has long been accepted, yet students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. First published in 1980, this study demonstrates how biblical typology, an apparently arcane interpretative mode, had profound effects on the secular culture of the Victorian age: its art, literature and thought. George Landow considers the way in which the average English believer learned to read their Bible in terms of the types and shadows of Christ, the various ways in which Victorian poetry and hymns employed certain imagery, and the use of typological symbolism in narrative poetry, prose fiction, dramatic monologue and non-fiction. In a concluding chapter, he investigates the particularly complex, and often ironic, combinations of typological image and typological structure.
With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century. This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on ‘Varieties of Victorianism’ offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years. Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (IfAA), language: English, abstract: The Victorian Age is marked by enormous changes. Mark Twain expressed it this way: “and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.” (Abrams 61993 : 891). Besides industrial and social changes, the era also saw a growth in literature, and great authors like Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde who are still read today. Generally, the term ‘Victorian’ marks the time of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 till 1901, but it is often extended and for many historians it started with the passage of the first Reform Bill in 1832. Since the era comprises about seventy years, many drastic changes occurred during this time, and the distinguishing characteristics of the individual authors cannot be combined into a general mood. Consequently one cannot call it a homogenous period, and it is necessary to distinguish it into three different parts. Since the transitions were smooth, the exact division may differ between historians. The early phase is a period of changes and growth, but it also saw a depression and demonstrations of workmen. In the 1850s the Great Exhibition in 1851 and Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” in 1859 can be seen as the beginning of the middle period, a time of national prosperity. England was the leading industrial power, and English confidence was at its high point. The late Victorian period covers the last two decades of the century. It can be characterized by a general change of the Victorian mood: doubts and fear of decay dominated, and literature started to shatter into various very different forms. This term paper will give a brief overview over the conditions and the literature of the Victorian era. The diversity of the age will be shown and explained. Therefore each genre will be described separately. Furthermore I will summarize the works of major authors and while doing so show the contrasts between them.
Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.
Ideal for bringing an old-timey charm to newsletters, posters, display ads, and other graphic projects, this spectacular sampling of 24 Victorian typefaces includes such distinctive fonts as Stereopticon, Chorus Girl, Glorietta, Hogarth Antique, Jagged, Romanesque, Rubens, and Wedlock. All of these black-and-white typefaces include complete uppercase alphabets, numerals, and punctuation; most feature lowercase characters.
