The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel
Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470779853

This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture

Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture
Author: Sabine Schülting
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317392612

Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.

The New Victorians

The New Victorians
Author: Rene Denfeld
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-09-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0446565237

Journalist Rene Denfeld explains why her generation has become alienated from the women's movement, maintaining that the actions of the movement's current leadership have actually encouraged a return to the kind of sexual repression and political powerlessness challenged by feminists in the 1970s. Here she offers a practial battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination
Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521766672

This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650-1940

Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650-1940
Author: Greta Jones
Publisher: Cork University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1999
Genre: Disease
ISBN: 9781859181102

A pioneering collection of essays aiming to open up the previously neglected area of the social history of medicine in Ireland.

Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction

Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction
Author: Jane Wood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199247134

Nervous illness and the study of how body and mind connected, were of intense interest to Victorian medical writers and novelists alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. Alongside detailed examinations of some of the era's most influential neurological and physiological theories, Jane Wood offers fresh readings of fictions by Charlotte Bront , George MacDonald, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing.

Poor Things

Poor Things
Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2024-10-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1478059974

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things, Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized.