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Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".
An energetic and exhilarating account of the Victorian entertainment industry, its extraordinary success and enduring impact The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century’s growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created ‘palaces of pleasure’. In this vivid, captivating book, Lee Jackson charts the rise of well-known institutions such as gin palaces, music halls, seaside resorts and football clubs, as well as the more peculiar attractions of the pleasure garden and international exposition, ranging from parachuting monkeys and human zoos to theme park thrill rides. He explores how vibrant mass entertainment came to dominate leisure time and how the attempts of religious groups and secular improvers to curb ‘immorality’ in the pub, variety theater and dance hall faltered in the face of commercial success. The Victorians’ unbounded love of leisure created a nationally significant and influential economic force: the modern entertainment industry.
Richly illustrated with artwork and contemporary cartoons, this is a fascinating and engaging account of a neglected aspect of Victorian life.
Lewis Carroll's photographs of young girls, Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs of Madonnas and the photographs of Hannah Cullwick, maid of all work, pictured in masquerade - Carol Mavor addresses the erotic possibilities of these images, exploring not ony the sexualities of the girls, maids and Madonnas, but the pleasures taken - by the viewer, the photographer, the model - in imagining these sexualities.
Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life. Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects—homosexuals and prostitutes, for example—to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.
Examines traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in Victorian literature and culture through the writings of Bentham, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and others.
A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London. At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day. As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet. In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.
Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.
In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.
With readings of novels by Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and others, this work explores the relationship between illicit sex and the postal service in Victorian Britain.