Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel
Author: Michael Flavin
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1837641722

This text explores the theme of gambling in a range of 19th-century English novels. It examines the representation of gambling in the novels, the role that gambling played in the lives of the novelists, and gambling in the novels within the context of the development of Victorian society.

Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth Century Literature

Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth Century Literature
Author: Jonathan Taylor
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1837641773

Iinvestigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. This book explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science.

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men
Author: Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-05
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0807137367

In Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men, Thomas Ruys Smith collects nineteenth-century stories, sketches, and book excerpts by a gallery of authors to create a comprehensive collection of writings about the riverboat gambler. The voices of canonized writers such as William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, and, inevitably, Mark Twain hold prominent positions. But they mingle seamlessly with lesser-known pieces such as an excerpt from Edward Willett's sensationalistic dime novel Flush Fred's Full Hand, raucous sketches by anonymous Old Southwestern humorists from The Spirit of the Times, and colorful accounts by now nearly forgotten authors like Daniel R. Hundley and George W. Featherstonhaugh. Smith puts the twenty-eight selections in perspective with an Introduction that for the first time thoroughly explores the history and myth surrounding this endlessly fascinating American cultural icon.

Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
Author: Ann R. Hawkins
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438485565

A vital part of daily life in the nineteenth century, games and play were so familiar and so ubiquitous that their presence over time became almost invisible. Technological advances during the century allowed for easier manufacturing and distribution of board games and books about games, and the changing economic conditions created a larger market for them as well as more time in which to play them. These changing conditions not only made games more profitable, but they also increased the influence of games on many facets of culture. Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America focuses on the material and visual culture of both American and British games, examining how cultures of play intersect with evolving gender norms, economic structures, scientific discourses, social movements, and nationalist sentiments.

The Art of Uncertainty

The Art of Uncertainty
Author: Daniel Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009436112

Daniel Williams shows how, in a profoundly numerical age, Victorian novels imagined thought and action in the face of uncertainty.

Vice and the Victorians

Vice and the Victorians
Author: Mike Huggins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472525566

Vice and the Victorians explores the ways the Victorian world gave meanings to the word 'vice', and the role this complex notion played in shaping society. Mike Huggins provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of a term that, despite its vital importance to the Victorians, has thus far lacked a clear definition. Each chapter explores a different facet of vice. Firstly, the book seeks to define exactly what vice meant to the Victorians, exploring how the language of vice was used as a tool to beat down opposition and dissent. It considers the cultural geography and spatial dimensions of vice in the public and private spheres, before moving on to look at specific vices: the unholy trinity of drink, sex and gambling. Finally, it shifts from vice to virtue and the efforts of moral reformers, and reassesses the relationship between vice and respectability in Victorian life. In his lively and engaging discussion, Mike Huggins draws on a range of theory and exploits a wide variety of texts and representations from the periodical press, parliamentary reports and Acts, novels, obscene publications, paintings and posters, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets and investigative works. This will be an illuminating text for undergraduates studying Victorian Britain as well as anyone wishing to gain a more nuanced understanding of Victorian society.

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
Author: Jessica Richard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2011-05-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0230307272

Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks.

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867
Author: M. O'Cinneide
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0230583326

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres.

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Margaret Linley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131709865X

Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Each chapter focuses on a specific visual, acoustic, or haptic dimension of media, while also calling attention to the relationships among the three. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known literary, scientific, and pornographic writings. Topics include the development of a print culture for the visually impaired; the relationship between photography and narrative; the kaleidoscope and modern urban experience; Christmas gift books; poetry, painting and music as remediated forms; the interface among the piano, telegraph, and typewriter; Ernst Heinrich Weber's model of rationalized tactility; and how the shift from visual to auditory telegraphic instruments amplified anxieties about the place of women in nineteenth-century information networks. Full of surprising insights and connections, the collection offers new impetus for stimulating historical conversations and debates about nineteenth-century media, while also contributing fresh perspectives on new media and (re)mediation today.

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900
Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 788
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110394219

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.