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An important new study that seeks to establish what Victorian writers said about Greek culture and how their interpretations both molded and reflected the attitudes and values of the Victorian age. "Turner's readable, intelligent, thorough, witty, and magisterial book discovers and narrates a fundamental strain in British intellectual life from the late eighteenth century until the beginning of World War I. It is THE book on its subject. . . . Turner's study has changed, changed utterly, the Victorian landscape."-Richard Tobias, Victorian Poetry
Publisher Description
This collection of essays explores the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines we now take for granted took shape. The ways in which knowledge was tested also took on a new form, with the rise of written examinations. New institutions of knowledge were created: museums were important at the start of the period, universities had become prominent by the end. Victorians needed to make sense of the sheer scale of new information, to popularize it, and at the same time to exclude ignorance and error - a role carried out by encyclopaedias and popular publications. By studying the Victorian organization of knowledge in its institutional, social, and intellectual settings, these essays contribute to our wider consideration of the complex and much debated concept of knowledge.
Andrew Wawn draws together a wide range of source material, including novels, poems, lectures and periodicals, to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th century Britain.
A systematic exploration of Thomas Hardy's imaginative assimilation of particular Victorian sciences, this study draws on and swells the widening current of scholarly attention now being paid to the cultural meanings compacted and released by the nascent 'sciences of man' in the nineteenth century. Andrew Radford here situates Hardy's fiction and poetry in a context of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the Victorian age to accommodate an immense range of literal and figurative 'excavations' then taking place. Combining literary close readings with broad historical analyses, he explores Hardy's artistic response to geological, archaeological and anthropological findings. In particular, he analyzes Hardy's lifelong fascination with the doctrine of 'survivals,' a term coined by E.B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871) to denote customs, beliefs and practices persisting in isolation from their original cultural context. Radford reveals how Hardy's subtle reworking of Tylor's doctrine offers a valuable insight into the inter-penetration of science and literature during this period. An important aspect of Radford's research focuses on lesser known periodical literature that grew out of a British amateur antiquarian tradition of the nineteenth century. His readings of Hardy's literary notebooks disclose the degree to which Hardy's own considerable scientific knowledge was shaped by the middlebrow periodical press. Thus Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time raises questions not only about the reception of scientific ideas but also the creation of nonspecialist forms of scientific discourse. This book represents a genuinely new perspective for Hardy studies.
Hebrew and Hellene explores the intellectual and personal relations among John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater, three figures important in the development of nineteenth-century English thought and culture. Fundamentally concerned with the humanistic vision of Arnold and Pater, especially as they adapted the traditional religious culture to the needs of their generation, David DeLaura also recognizes Newman's central role. To a far greater degree than has been realized, Newman assumed a commanding position in the thought of the two younger men. DeLaura seeks to define the mechanics of the process by which the conservative religious humanism of Newman could be exploited in the fluid, relativistic, and "aesthetic" humanism of Pater. The careers of Arnold and Pater are viewed as a continuing effort to reconcile the opposing forces of one of the central modern myths, the great cultural struggle between religious and secular values—Arnold's Hebraism and Hellenism. DeLaura traces this important movement in nineteenth-century culture by studying the development of key phrases and ideas in the writings of the three men: the secularization of Newman's ideal of "inwardness" in Arnold's "criticism" and "culture" and in Pater's "impassioned contemplation"; the shared emphasis on an elite culture; the growing tendency to identify culture with the functions of traditional religion. Newman, as the supreme apologist of both religious orthodoxy and the older Oxonian tradition, offered a rich arsenal to the defenders of a literary culture increasingly threatened by the utilitarian spirit (!nd by a rising scientific naturalism. Moreover, with the appearance of his Apologia in 1864, the "mystery" and the "miracle" of Newman's personality intrigued a new literary generation. In Hebrew and Hellene DeLaura looks beyond the debates of the Late Victorians, the immediate inheritors of this legacy, to the continuing twentieth-century discussion of the nature of literature, its place in the humanizing process, and its role in a science-dominated civilization. He finds the problems faced by Pater, Arnold, and Newman—and some of their solutions—surprisingly relevant to unfinished contemporary debate.
This book investigates the ways in which ideas associated with the Celtic and the Classical have been used to construct identities (national/ethnic/regional etc.) in Britain, from the period of the Roman conquest to the present day.
In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.