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Sudden changes, opportunities, or revelations have always carried a special significance in Western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments, events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.
How closely was the social reality of Victorian England reflected in the vivid picture evoked by its literature? In this survey of the Victorian era the relation between literature and society is explained by means of three distinct sections. The first delineates the literary history in two chapters on the Victorian novel and Victorian poetry respectively. In the second and largest section a series of essays discuss various fundamental aspects of Victorian society: the economic and social framework, government and institutions, the sense of the past, painting and illustration, religion and the role of women. The third section offers two essays which explicitly relate a particular work to the society: one on Dickens' Dombey and Son, and the other on Tennyson's 'The Princess'. By turning to each essay after the rounded picture of Victorian society given in the previous sections, the reader will not only find his appreciation enhanced, but will also be enabled to argue back on equal terms in a way that is never possible with a survey of literature alone.
This is a thought-provoking synthesis of the Victorian period, focusing on the themes of science, religion, politics and art. It examines the developments which radically changed the intellectual climate and illustrates how their manifestations permeated Victorian literature. The author begins by establishing the social and institutional framework in which intellectual and cultural life developed. Special attention is paid to the reform agenda of new groups which challenged traditional society, and this perspective informs Gilmour's discussion throughout the book. He assesses Victorian religion, science and politics in their own terms and in relation to the larger cultural politics of the middle-class challenge to traditionalism. Familiar topics, such as the Oxford Movement and Darwinism, are seen afresh, and those once neglected areas which are now increasingly important to modern scholars are brought into clear focus, such as Victorian agnosticism, the politics of gender, 'Englishness', and photography. The most innovative feature of this compelling study is the prominence given to the contemporary preoccupation with time. The Victorians' time-hauntedness emerges as the defining feature of their civilisation - the remote time of geology and evolution, the public time of history, the private time of autobiography.
Focuses on the materiality of hands to show the role that the hand plays in Victorian literature and culture.
First published in 1981, this book represents the first comprehensive examination of Victorian society’s preoccupation with the ‘notion of the gentleman’ and how this was reflected in the literature of the time. Starting with Addison and Lord Chesterfield, the author explores the influence of the gentlemanly ideal on the evolution of the English middle classes, and reveals its central part in the novels of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope. Combining social and cultural analysis with literary criticism, this book provides new readings of Vanity Fair and Great Expectations, a fresh approach to Trollope, and a detailed account of the various streams that fed into the idea of the gentleman.
Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.
Text vs. hypertext: seeing the Victorian object as in itself it really is / Gerhard Joseph -- The golden bough and the unknowable / Christopher Herbert -- Daniel Deronda: a new epistemology / George Levine -- Walter Pater's impressionism and the form of historical revival Carolyn Williams -- Arnold and the authorization of criticism / Herbert F. Tucker -- Aesthetics, ethics, and unreadable acts in George Eliot / Jonathan Loesberg -- The structure of anxiety in political economy and Hard times / Mary Poovey -- How to be a benefactor without any money: the chill of welfare in Great expectations / Bruce Robbins -- Tracking the sentimental eye / Judith Stoddart -- Knowing and telling in Dickens's retrospects / Rosemarie Bodenheimer -- Inside the shark's mouth: William Lovett's struggle for political language / Margery Sabin -- Knowing a life: Edith Simcox, Sat est vixisse? / Gillian Beer.