Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920

Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920
Author: Pamela Thurschwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2001-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139428853

In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.

The Rise of English Studies

The Rise of English Studies
Author: David John Palmer
Publisher: London ; New York : Published for the University of Hull by the Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1965
Genre: English language
ISBN:

Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918

Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918
Author: Patricia Pye
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2017-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137540176

This book explores the literary representation of late Victorian and early Edwardian London from an auditory perspective, arguing that readers should ‘listen’ to impressions of the city, as described by writers such as Conrad, Doyle, Ford and Gissing. It was in this period that London began to ‘sound modern’ and, through a closer hearing of its literature, writers’ wider responses to modernity are revealed. The book is structured into familiar modernist themes, revisiting time and space, social progress and popular culture through an exploration of the sound impressions of some key works. Each chapter is contextualized by these themes, revealing how the sound of the news, social protest, music hall and suburbanization impacted on writers’ literary imaginations. Suitable for students of modernist literature and specialists in sound studies, this book will also appeal to readers with a wider interest in London’s history and popular culture between 1880-1918.

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture
Author: Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2017-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319495356

This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.

Serials to Graphic Novels

Serials to Graphic Novels
Author: Catherine J. Golden
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813063736

The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the realist artists of the "Sixties," this volume examines the entire lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant genre, arguing that it arose from and continually built on the creative vision of the caricature-style illustrators of the 1830s. She surveys the fluidity of illustration styles across serial installments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Serials to Graphic Novels examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Trilby. Golden explores factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book—the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies—and that ultimately created a mass market for illustrated fiction. Golden identifies present-day visual adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope as well as original Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Victorian-themed novels like Batman: Noël as the heirs to the Victorian illustrated book. With these adaptations and additions, the Victorian canon has been refashioned and repurposed visually for new generations of readers.

Historical Criticism Notebook

Historical Criticism Notebook
Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780199688012

This volume contains the newly transcribed and annotated text of one of Oscar Wilde's unpublished notebooks that functioned as a major ante-text for the composition of Wilde's first post-graduate essay, Historical Criticism, written in 1879 as an entry for the Chancellor's English Essay Prize at Oxford. Attempting to win a fellowship at Oxford as a serious scholar, Wilde used the notebook to record his research into modern and classical historians and to formulate language that appears, often in revised form, in the essay. The notebook shows us his practices of research and composition: he often worked on particular historians or issues in sections of adjoining pages, accumulating examples from their works and composing passages describing their exemplary practices and their awareness of issues in historiography. His entries include materials drawn from classical historians and philosophers, for example, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, Livy, Lucian, and Plutarch, as well as mentions and/or materials from modern historians and philosophers such as Giambattista Vico, J. G. Fichte, Victor Cousin, George Grote, G. H. Lewes, Henry T. Buckle, Robert Flint, J. A. Symonds, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hippolyte Taine, Jules Michelet, Herbert Spencer, and Ernest Renan. The notebook not only tells us much about Wilde's practices of composing and editing the language that appears in the essay, it also contains the unused materials Wilde studied and for which he drafted language. For example, Wilde scholars will find scattered throughout the notebook the unused phrases, sentences, and notations that relate to subjects or ideas that Wilde mentions or expands in other notebook entries. These entries and drafts of his commentary are interesting in themselves as Wilde's expanded summation of the contributions of these historians to his topic; they also reveal which episodes from history and characteristics of their historiography he found worthy of study. Finally, they show Wilde's wit and comparative imagination at work finding parallels in early modern history and literature for his chosen examples.