The Commodity Culture Of Victorian England

Author : Thomas Richards
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804719018
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Commodity Culture of Victorian England written by Thomas Richards and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521471336
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Novels Behind Glass written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-10-19 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Author : Catherine Waters
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135195041X
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words written by Catherine Waters and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

Author : Sean Grass
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110848445X
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative written by Sean Grass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

Author : Erin O'Connor
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822326168
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Raw Material written by Erin O'Connor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the intertwined metaphoric language of capitalism and disease in nineteenth-century England.

Author : Simone Natale
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271077395
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Supernatural Entertainments written by Simone Natale and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Author : Tammy C. Whitlock
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-century England written by Tammy C. Whitlock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications this had for society. The author emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution and, through a focus on retail crime and individual cases of middle-class shoplifting and fraud, provides the first detailed history of the "kleptomaniac" woman in 19th c. England.

Author : Jonathon Shears
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 9781409439905
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Literary Bric-à-brac and the Victorians written by Jonathon Shears and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is concerned with the phenomenon of bric-a-brac in Victorian literature. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the traditions of commodity culture.

Author : Sarah Amato
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442617608
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Beastly Possessions written by Sarah Amato and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beastly Possessions, Sarah Amato chronicles the unusual ways in which Victorians of every social class brought animals into their daily lives. Captured, bred, exhibited, collected, and sold, ordinary pets and exotic creatures – as well as their representations – became commodities within Victorian Britain’s flourishing consumer culture. As a pet, an animal could be a companion, a living parlour decoration, and proof of a household’s social and moral status. In the zoo, it could become a public pet, an object of curiosity, a symbol of empire, or even a consumer mascot. Either kind of animal might be painted, photographed, or stuffed as a taxidermic specimen. Using evidence ranging from pet-keeping manuals and scientific treatises to novels, guidebooks, and ephemera, this fascinating, well-illustrated study opens a window into an underexplored aspect of life in Victorian Britain.

Author : Suzanne Daly
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472071343
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Empire Inside written by Suzanne Daly and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Empire Inside is unique in its tight focus on the objects from one geographical location, and their deployment in one genre of fiction. This combination results in a powerful study with a wealth of fine formal analyses of literary texts and a similar trove of marvelous historical data." ---Elaine Freedgood, New York University "In The Empire Inside, Suzanne Daly does a wonderful job integrating an array of primary materials, especially novels and journal essays, to show the extent to which these 'foreign' colonial products of India represented absolutely central aspects of domestic life, at once part of the unremarkable everyday experience of Victorians and rich with meanings." ---Timothy Carens, College of Charleston By the early nineteenth century, imperial commodities had become commonplace in middle-class English homes. Such Indian goods as tea, textiles, and gemstones led double lives, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels reveals how Indian imports encapsulated new ideas about both the home and the world in Victorian literature and culture. In novels by Charlotte Bront , Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope, the regularity with which Indian commodities appear bespeaks their burgeoning importance both ideologically and commercially. Such domestic details as the drinking of tea and the giving of shawls as gifts point us toward suppressed connections between the feminized realm of private life and the militarized realm of foreign commerce. Tracing the history of Indian imports yields a record of the struggles for territory and political power that marked the coming-into-being of British India; reading the novels of the period for the ways in which they infuse meaning into these imports demonstrates how imperialism was written into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century England. Situated at the intersection of Victorian studies, material cultural studies, gender studies, and British Empire studies, The Empire Inside is written for academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in all of these fields. Suzanne Daly is Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst.