Victorian Identities

Victorian Identities PDF

Author: Ruth Robbins

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1995-12-06

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1349243493

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The Victorian period was one of enormous cultural diversity with places for figures as different as Alfred Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Victorian Identities simultaneously celebrates that diversity whilst drawing out the connections between disparate voices. With essays on the 'Greats' of the period - Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Wilde - as well as on the less well-known sensation writer, Rhoda Broughton, and on the formation of children's voices in Victorian literature - the collection rejects narrow definitions of the period and its values, and exposes its texts to readings informed by contemporary literary theory.

National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain

National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain PDF

Author: M. Morgan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-01-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0230512151

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This book explores components of national identity in Victorian Britain by analyzing travel literature. It draws on published and unpublished travel journals by middle-class men and women from England, Scotland, and Wales who toured the Continent and/or Britain. The main aim is to illustrate both the contexts that inspired the various collective identities of Britishness, Englishness, Scotsness, and Welshness, as well as the qualities Victorian men and women had in mind when they used such terms to identify and imagine themselves collectively.

Scenes of Sympathy

Scenes of Sympathy PDF

Author: Audrey Jaffe

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 150171998X

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In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography PDF

Author: Heidi L. Pennington

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2018-04-30

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0826274064

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This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

Irish Identities in Victorian Britain

Irish Identities in Victorian Britain PDF

Author: Roger Swift

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317965574

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Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature

Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature PDF

Author: Chiara Battisti

Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH

Published: 2023-05-12

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 373290959X

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Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature is a compelling exploration of the representation of clothing in Victorian literature. The author argues that the study of fashion and clothing can contribute to a deeper understanding of literary texts and their contexts. While fashion has often been associated with frivolity, this volume sheds light on the novel possibilities that can arise from the intersection of literary analysis with fashion theory, revealing fashion as a system of meaning that reflects deep social and cultural transformations, and offering new and innovative directions in research and literary analysis. Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature draws on the conceptual framework of fashion theory to investigate novels in which the fashion system organises the signs of the dressed body, almost as if forging its own language. Focusing on the Victorian period, pivotal period in fashion history, the volume offers a rich and nuanced account of the complex relationship between clothing, literature, and identity, in nineteenth-century literature.

Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel

Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel PDF

Author: Jean Arnold

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-16

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1317002199

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In this study of Victorian jewels and their representation, Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West. Diamonds and other gems, Arnold argues, symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered "prisms of culture." Mined in the far reaches of the empire, they traversed geographical space and cultural boundaries, representing monetary value and evoking empire, class lineage, class membership, gender relations, and aesthetics. Arnold analyzes the many roles material objects fill in Western culture and surveys the cross-cultural history of the Victorian diamond, uncovering how this object became both preeminent and representative of Victorian values. Her close readings of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, George Eliot's Middlemarch, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds show gendered, aesthetic, economic, fetishistic, colonial, legal, and culturally symbolic interpretations of jewelry as they are enacted through narrative. Taken together, these divergent interpretations offer a holistic view of a material culture's affective attachment to objects. As the assigned meanings of jewels turn them into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas, human interactions with gems elicit emotional responses that bind the materialist culture together.

Social Identity and Literary Form in the Victorian Novel

Social Identity and Literary Form in the Victorian Novel PDF

Author: Jill Franks

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1476646864

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Enormous social changes during the Victorian era inspired some of the finest novels in the English language. In the final decades of the century, rigid application of gender rules and class hierarchies began to relax. Consciousness of the injustice of class- and gender-based discrimination was growing. Meanwhile, bias against nonwhite peoples was worsening. The British used scientific racism to justify their relentless expansion in Africa and Asia. Viewing Victorian literature through the lens of these social changes gives the modern reader a fresh way to interpret the novels and to appreciate their relevance to contemporary issues. Nineteenth-century novelists deployed realism, satire, and the bildungsroman to resist or support leading ideologies of their time, including the separate spheres doctrine and British supremacism. Each chapter is an elaboration of the author's university lectures about Victorian classics. The tone is scholarly yet conversational, directed to the undergraduate student as well as the general reader or Victoriaphile. The text presents concepts in interdisciplinary cultural studies, discusses the uses of genre for rhetorical and social purposes, and exposes paradoxes of the era. The coherent style, abundant examples, discussion questions, and literary glossary make this book a valuable supplement for readers of the Victorian novel.

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