Class Culture And Suburban Anxieties In The Victorian Era

Author : Lara Baker Whelan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113517718X
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era written by Lara Baker Whelan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates how representations of the Victorian suburb in mid- to late-nineteenth century British writing occasioned a literary sub-genre unique to this period, one that attempted to reassure readers that the suburb was a place where outsiders could be controlled and where middle-class values could be enforced. Whelan explores the dissonance created by the differences between the suburban ideal and suburban realities, recognizing the persistence of that ideal in the face of abundant evidence that it was hardly ever realized. She discusses evidence from primary and secondary sources about perceptions and realities of suburban living, showing what it meant to live in a "real" Victorian suburb. The book also demonstrates how the suburban ideal (with its elements of privacy, cleanliness, rus in urbe, and respectability), in its relation to culturally embedded ideas about the Beautiful and Picturesque, gained such a strong foothold in the Victorian middle class that contemplating its failure caused intense anxiety. Whelan goes on to trace the ways in which this anxiety is represented in literature.

Author : Lara Baker Whelan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135177198
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era written by Lara Baker Whelan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Whelan demonstrates the way in which representations of the Victorian suburb in mid- to late-nineteenth century British writing occasioned a literary sub-genre unique to this period€that attempted to reassure readers that the suburb was a place where outsiders could be controlled and where middle-class values could be enforced. In particular, Whelan draws attention to the discourse of the suburb as a space of cultural contention in an attempt to illuminate a facet of class history that has often been ignored, overgeneralized, or misunderstood. At the same time, €she rec.

Author : Brian Gibson
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476686440
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Man of the House written by Brian Gibson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres--speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.

Author : Kristen Pond
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000990087
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830–1865 written by Kristen Pond and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830-1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the industrial revolution, transportation technologies, and globalization. While studies of nineteenth-century Britain tend to trace the rise of an aloof cosmopolitanism and distancing narrative strategies, this volume calls attention to the personalizing impulse in nineteenth-century literary form, investigating the deeply personal reflections on individual and national identities. In her book, Dr. Pond leads the reader through homes of the urban poor, wandering the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, loitering in suburban neighborhoods, riding the railway, and touring a country estate. Readers will experience how the ordinary can be enchanting, and how the mundane can be unexpected, discovering a new way of thinking about strangers and their influence on our lives. Through an examination of the short and long fictional forms of Martineau, Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, and Braddon, this study locates the figure of the stranger as a powerful topos in the story Victorian literature and the ethics of social relations. This book will be ideal for those seeking to understand the dynamics of the stranger in Victorian fiction as a figure for understanding the changing dynamics of social relations in England in the early nineteenth century.

Author : Sarah Bilston
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300186363
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Promise of the Suburbs written by Sarah Bilston and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women From the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the suburbs were maligned by the aristocratic elite as dull zones of low cultural ambition and vulgarity, as well as generally female spaces isolated from the consequential male world of commerce. Sarah Bilston argues that these attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women’s work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals how suburban life offered ambitious women, especially women writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. From more familiar figures such as the sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon to interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon, this work presents a more complicated portrait of how women and English society at large navigated a fast-growing, rapidly changing landscape.

Author : Minna Vuohelainen
Publisher : University of Wales Press
ISBN 13 : 1783163402
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Richard Marsh written by Minna Vuohelainen and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

Author : Sabine Schülting
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317392612
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Sabine Schülting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.

Author : Monica Flegel
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317564863
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Monica Flegel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Nadine Boehm-Schnitker
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134614691
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture written by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.

Author : Ilja Van Damme
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487537956
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creativity from Suburban Nowheres written by Ilja Van Damme and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-07-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs. Contributors explore the particular forms of creativity that suburbs elicit both in the process of their making, materialization, and community construction, and in the myriad ways in which suburbs are inhabited and experienced. They highlight accounts of suburbs as places that give people the space and latitude to shape individual and collective identities through creative practices at odds with mainstream culture, and often remote from the classic agglomeration "assets" associated with inner cities. Anchored in historical and geographical research, this volume highlights how and in what forms creativity should be understood in the suburbs, why and when creativity can be found, and how the notion of suburban creativity overthrows ingrained and dominant normative viewpoints. Rather than seeing creativity arise despite its suburban location, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres illuminates the emancipatory potential of suburbs for creativity.