Victorian Sexual Dissidence
Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Author: Richard Dellamora

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-04-08

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0226924793

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Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects. This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies. Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence

Author: John Holmes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1351946331

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In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence The House of Life. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Wilfrid Blunt and Augusta Webster, and their early twentieth-century successors Rosa Newmarch and Rupert Brooke, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.

Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture
Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture

Author: F. Roden

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-10-23

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0230513042

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Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual identity. Roden charts the emergence of the modern homosexual in relation to religious, not exclusively sociological discourses. Positing Catholicism as complementary to classical Greece, he challenges the separatism of sexuality and religion in critical practice. Moving from Newman and Rossetti, to Hopkins, Wilde, and Michael Field amongst others, Same-Sex Desire claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.

Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism
Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism

Author: Jason Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1351577123

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Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism presents the first sustained re-evaluation of the life and work of one of the most acclaimed sculptors of the late-Victorian period. Drawing on important new archival sources, this ground-breaking study challenges the customary assumption that Aestheticism was primarily a literary, painterly or architectural phenomena. Jason Edwards reveals both the diverse ways in which Gilbert's sculptures operated within the context of Aestheticism and also how these works provided a unique and provocative commentary on the history of masculine friendship and eroticism in the period leading up to and beyond the Wilde trials in 1895. Detailed readings are offered of the relationship of Gilbert's work to essays by Pater and Swinburne, poems, plays, and novels by Wilde and W. S. Gilbert, and paintings by Burne-Jones, Leighton, Rossetti, Solomon, Whistler, and Watts. With over 90 illustrations, including key contemporary photographs showing Gilbert's works in their original contexts, this book makes a major contribution to the field of Victorian sculpture studies.

Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840-1940
Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840-1940

Author: Dennis Denisoff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-03-16

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780521024891

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This original and provocative 2001 study discusses the work of a number of authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to argue that mainstream society was enabled to accept the non-normative sexuality of the Aesthetic Movement chiefly through parody and self-parody. Highlighting Victorian popular culture, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds an important dimension to the theorisations of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics.

The Late Victorian Gothic
The Late Victorian Gothic

Author: Hilary Grimes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1317026268

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Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

Sexual Dissidence
Sexual Dissidence

Author: Jonathan Dollimore

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-19

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 019256191X

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Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why, in other words, is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history - history rather than human nature - which has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity. In the process it brilliantly links writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig. So Freud's theory of perversion is discovered to be more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve. The book further shows how the literature, histories, and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

A. Mary F. Robinson
A. Mary F. Robinson

Author: Patricia Rigg

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-09-15

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0228010136

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Born in England in 1857, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson contributed to cultural and literary currents from nineteenth-century Victorianism to twentieth-century modernism; she was equally at home in London and Paris and prolific in both English and French. Yet Robinson remains an enigma on many levels. This literary biography integrates Robinson's unorthodox life with her development as a writer across genres. Best known for her poetry, Robinson was also a respected biographer, history writer, travel writer, and contributor of reviews and articles to the Times Literary Supplement for nearly forty years. She had a romantic friendship with the writer Vernon Lee and two happy – and celibate – marriages. Her salons in London and Paris were attended by major literary and artistic figures, and she counted amongst her friends Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Gaston Paris, Ernest Renan, and Maurice Barrès. Reflecting a decade of research in international archives and family papers, A. Mary F. Robinson reveals the extraordinary woman behind the popular writer and critically acclaimed poet.

A Victorian Muse
A Victorian Muse

Author: Julia Straub

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-09-13

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1441110712

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The figure of Dante's Beatrice can be seen as a cultural phenomenon or myth during the nineteenth century, inspiring a wide variety of representations in literature and the visual arts. This study looks at the cultural afterlife of Beatrice in the Victorian period in remarkably different contexts. Focusing on literary representations and selected examples from the visual arts, this book examines works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walter Pater as well as by John Ruskin, Maria Rossetti and Arthur Henry Hallam. Julia Straub's analysis shows how the various representations of Beatrice in literature and in the visual arts reflect in meaningful ways some of the central social and aesthetic concerns of the Victorian period, most importantly its discourse on gender. This study offers fascinating insights into the Victorian reception of Dante by exploring the powerful appeal of his muse.

Sex
Sex

Author: Daniel Orrells

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-04-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0857726064

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Sex is fundamental to society. We cannot think about politics, power, identity or culture without also thinking about sexuality. Despite this, the scientific study of sexual behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Doctors, legal experts and other intellectuals have all pondered challenging questions in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest sexual research. How might we separate talking about sex scientifically from discussing and consuming pornography? How do we speak objectively about desire and pleasure? And how do the words that we use to talk about sex affect what we are able to say about it? Such questions increasingly inform public discourse across a variety of media. Showing how ancient words and ideas have left a significant imprint on present-day ideas about sex, Daniel Orrells offers a bold new narrative of how the scientific study of sexuality came into being. Uncovering the intriguing story of how the obscene and erotic verse of Roman epigram and love poetry became the sanitised language of nineteenth-century sexual science, this divertingly readable book demonstrates how the reception of both Latin and Greek texts was central to the development of modernmsexology and psychoanalysis. Ranging from Sappho, Catullus and Martial to Michel Foucault, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the author reveals just how profoundly classics has shaped the landscape of sexual identity that we inhabit today.