The Byronic Hero and the Rhetoric of Masculinity in the 19th Century British Novel

The Byronic Hero and the Rhetoric of Masculinity in the 19th Century British Novel PDF

Author: D. Michael Jones

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1476662282

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From action movies to video games to sports culture, modern masculinity is intrinsically associated with violent competition. This legacy has its roots in the 19th-century Romantic figure of the Byronic hero--the ideal Victorian male: devoted husband, sexual revolutionary and weaponized servant of the state. His silhouette can be traced through the works of authors like Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. More than a literary genealogy, this history of the Byronic hero and his heirs follows the changes that masculinity has undergone in response to industrial upheaval, the rise of the middle class and the demands of global competition, from the Victorian period through the early 20th century.

Morality and the Law in British Detective and Spy Fiction, 1880-1920

Morality and the Law in British Detective and Spy Fiction, 1880-1920 PDF

Author: Kate Morrison

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-05-08

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1476639752

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Who decides what is right or wrong, ethical or immoral, just or unjust? In the world of crime and spy fiction between 1880 and 1920, the boundaries of the law were blurred and justice called into question humanity's moral code. As fictional detectives mutated into spies near the turn of the century, the waning influence of morality on decision-making signaled a shift in behavior from idealistic principles towards a pragmatic outlook taken in the national interest. Taking a fresh approach to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, this book examines how Holmes and his rival maverick literary detectives and spies manipulated the law to deliver a fairer form of justice than that ordained by parliament. Multidisciplinary, this work views detective fiction through the lenses of law, moral philosophy, and history, and incorporates issues of gender, equality, and race. By studying popular publications of the time, it provides a glimpse into public attitudes towards crime and morality and how those shifting opinions helped reconstruct the hero in a new image.

Reading Eminem

Reading Eminem PDF

Author: Glenn Fosbraey

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 3030796264

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This book critically analyses Eminem’s studio album releases from his first commercial album release The Slim Shady LP in 1999, to 2020’s Music To Be Murdered By, through the lens of storytelling, truth and rhetoric, narrative structure, rhyme scheme and type, perspective, and celebrity culture. In terms of lyrical content, no area has been off-limits to Eminem, and he has written about domestic violence, murder, rape, child abuse, incest, drug addiction, and torture during his career. But whilst he will always be associated with these dark subjects, Mathers has also explored fatherhood, bereavement, mental illness, poverty, friendship, and love within his lyrics, and the juxtaposition between these very different themes (sometimes within the same song), make his lyrics complex, deep, and deserving of proper critical discussion. The first full-length monograph concerning Eminem's lyrics, this book affords the same rigorous analysis to a hip-hop artist as would be applied to any great writer's body of work; such analysis of 'popular' music is often overlooked. In addition to his rich exploration of Eminem's lyrics, Fosbraey furthermore delves into a variety of different aspects within popular music including extra-verbal elements, image, video, and surrounding culture. This critical study of his work will be an invaluable resource to academics working in the fields of Popular Music, English Literature, or Cultural Studies.

The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle PDF

Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 164014093X

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Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation PDF

Author: Sarah Wootton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 113757934X

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Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity PDF

Author: P. Mallett

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 113749154X

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What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800

Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800 PDF

Author: Barbara Korte

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-09

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 331933557X

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This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel PDF

Author: Tara MacDonald

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1317317807

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By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature PDF

Author: Andrew Dowling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13:

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Dowling (humanities and social sciences, U. of Technology, Sydney) examines the concept of masculinity in Victorian literature. The focus is on how an official social ideal of manly discipline co-existed with a literature that was full of images of male deviance. Dowling concludes that male novelists such as Thackeray and Dickens constructed and demonized male "others" as a way to establish their own manliness. The text is based upon the author's Ph.D. thesis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Perfect Gentleman

The Perfect Gentleman PDF

Author: Karen Volland Waters

Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Incorporated

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 9780820426655

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"The Perfect Gentleman sees the construct of the gentleman in the last third of the nineteenth century as a key to understanding the dynamics of patriarchy and the instability of gender roles. Through close readings of fiction by men, the author critiques the idea of the gentleman as a model for masculine control and examines the benefits, costs, and systems for maintaining control as they surface in the literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved