Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Author: Gina M. Dorré

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780754655152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The ubiquity of horses in literary texts, visual media, and other cultural documents indicates a vibrant cult of the horse during the Victorian Period. Treating the novels of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore, Gina M. Dorr


Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Author: Gina M. Dorré

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1351875892

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.


Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1137602198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.


Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Monica Flegel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1317564855

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the "natural" family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial "outcasts" who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet, that is, was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E. Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond.


Victorian Writers and the Environment

Victorian Writers and the Environment

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1317002024

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Applying ecocritical theory to the work of Victorian writers, this collection explores what a diversity of ecocritical approaches can offer students and scholars of Victorian literature, at the same time that it critiques the general effectiveness of ecocritical theory. Interdisciplinary in their approach, the essays take up questions related to the nonhuman, botany, landscape, evolutionary science, and religion. The contributors cast a wide net in terms of genre, analyzing novels, poetry, periodical works, botanical literature, life-writing, and essays. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and noncanonical writers, including Charles Dickens, the Brontes, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Jane Webb Loudon, Anna Sewell, and Richard Jefferies, Victorian Writers and the Environment demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors engaged not only with humans’ interaction with the environment during the Victorian period, but also how some authors anticipated more recent attitudes toward the environment.


The Horse in Literature and Film

The Horse in Literature and Film

Author: Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1498534929

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Horses serve as central characters in great literary works that span ages and cultures. But why? In The Horse in Literature and Film: Uncovering a Transcultural Paradigm, Francisco LaRubia-Prado, Ph.D. explores the deep symbolic meaning, cultural significance, and projective power that these magnificent animals carry in literature, film, and the human psyche. Examining iconic texts and films from the Middle Ages to the present—and from Western and Eastern cultural traditions—this book reveals how horses, as timeless symbols of nature, bring harmony to unbalanced situations. Regardless of how disrupted human lives become, whether through the suffering caused by the atrocities of war, or the wrestling of individuals and society with issues of authenticity, horses offer an antidote firmly rooted in nature. The Horse in Literature and Film is a book for our time. After an introduction to the field of animal studies, it analyzes celebrated works by authors and film directors such as Leo Tolstoy, Heinrich von Kleist, D.H. Lawrence, Akira Kurosawa, John Huston, Girish Karnad, Michael Morpurgo, and Benedikt Erlingsson. Exploring issues such as power, the boundaries between justice and the law, the meaning of love and home, the significance of cultural belonging, and the consequences of misguided nationalism, this book demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of human disconnection from nature, and the role of the horse in individual and societal healing.


Victorians and Their Animals

Victorians and Their Animals

Author: Brenda Ayres

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0429768672

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyse the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.


Victorian Vulgarity

Victorian Vulgarity

Author: Susan David Bernstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1351875833

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.


Equine Fictions

Equine Fictions

Author: Jopi Nyman

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1527533212

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This innovative volume approaches the intriguing relationship between humans and horses in 21st-century Anglophone fiction and autobiography from the perspectives of affect and politics. It addresses the strong emotional power attached to the human-horse bond, and contextualizes horse narratives within debates concerning identity and its politics. The in-depth analysis deals with topics such as the intertwinement of humans and animals, healing, mourning, and nostalgia in horse narratives, and the formation of gendered and national identities. The volume pays particular attention to life writing by Susan Richards, Rupert Isaacson, and Buck Brannaman, fiction by Gillian Mears and Jane Smiley, and Follyfoot fanfiction. Because of its focus on narratives telling of today’s human-horse encounters and its explicit attention to diverse textual forms, this book represents a unique contribution to the study of human-horse encounters in contemporary writing, and will be of particular use to scholars working in human-animal studies, Anglophone literature, and American studies.


Black Beauty

Black Beauty

Author: Anna Sewell

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1460405366

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a classic work of children’s literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to “induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses,” Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell’s book contributed significantly to late nineteenth-century campaigns for humane treatment of horses and remains a seminal anti-cruelty text today. The Broadview Press edition reproduces the first edition of 1877, restoring material often abridged in other modern editions. Appendices include materials on contemporary animal-rights movements, “equine management,” and Victorian understandings of animal emotions.