Victorian demons

Victorian demons
Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1526125579

Victorian demons provides the first extensive exploration of largely middle-class masculinities in crisis at the fin de siècle. It analyses how ostensibly controlling models of masculinity became demonised in a variety of literary and medical contexts, revealing the period to be much more ideologically complex than has hitherto been understood, and makes a significant contribution to Gothic scholarship. Andrew Smith demonstrates how a Gothic language of monstrosity, drawn from narratives such as 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and 'Dracula', increasingly influenced a range of medical and cultural contexts, destabilising these apparently dominant masculine scripts. He provides a coherent analysis of a range of examples relating to masculinity drawn from literary, medical, legal and sociological contexts, including Joseph Merrick ('The Elephant Man'), the Whitechapel murders of 1888, Sherlock Holmes's London, the writings and trials of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration and medical textbooks on syphilis.

Woman and the Demon

Woman and the Demon
Author: Nina Auerbach
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1982
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674954076

Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria
Author: A. E. Moorat
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2010-01-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061991333

For all the rabid fans who devoured Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, comes A.E. Moorat’s Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter! This outrageously entertaining and deeply irreverent tale of palace intrigue and bloody supernatural mayhem features the most unlikely monster-slayer ever to go toe-to-toe with the living dead. It’s George A. Romero meets the Bronte sisters—it’s Max Brooks’s World War Z in Victorian garb! Watch out flesh-eating zombie scum, it’s Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter!

The Late Victorian Gothic

The Late Victorian Gothic
Author: Hilary Grimes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317026268

Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

Domesticated Bachelors and Femininity in Victorian Novels

Domesticated Bachelors and Femininity in Victorian Novels
Author: Jennifer Beauvais
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2020-10-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476639620

Domestic issues, chastity, morality, marriage and love are concerns we typically associate with Victorian female characters. But what happens when men in Victorian novels begin to engage in this type of feminine discourse? While we are familiar with certain Victorian women seeking freedom by moving beyond the domestic sphere, there is an equally interesting movement by the domestic man into the private space through his performance of femininity. This book defines the domesticated bachelor, examines the effects of the blurring of boundaries between the public and private spheres, and traces the evolution of the public discourse on masculinity in novels such as Bronte's Shirley, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This bachelor, along with his female counterpart, the New Woman, opens up for discussion new definitions of Victorian masculinity and gender boundaries and blurs the rigid distinction between the gendered spaces thought to be in place during the Victorian period.

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900
Author: Phyllis Weliver
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351744488

This title was first publushed in 2000. Phyllis Weliver investigates representations of female musicians in British novels from 1860 to 1900 with regard to changing gender roles, musical practices and scientific discourses. During this time women were portrayed in complex and nuanced ways as they played and sang in family drawing rooms. Women in the 19th century were judged on their manners, appearance, language and other accomplishments such as sewing or painting, but music stood out as an area where women were encouraged to take centre stage and demonstrate their genteel education, graceful movements and self-expression. However within the novels of the Victorian were begining to move away from portraying the musical accomplishments of middle- and upper-class women as feminine and worthwhile towards depicting musical women as truly dangerous. This book explores the reasons for this reaction and the way labels and images were constructed to show extremes of behaviour, and it looks at whether the fiction was depicting the real trends in music at the time.

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity
Author: Laura Eastlake
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2019
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0198833032

Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.

Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture

Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture
Author: Louise Penner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 131731672X

This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Dickens’s involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to medicine in crime fiction.

Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture

Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture
Author: Saverio Tomaiuolo
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319969501

This book argues that ‘deviance’ represents a central issue in neo-Victorian culture, and that the very concept of neo-Victorianism is based upon the idea of ‘diverging’ from accepted notions regarding the nineteenth-century frame of mind. However, the study of the ways in which the Victorian age has been revised by contemporary authors does not only entail analogies with the present but proves – by introducing what is perhaps a more pertinent description of the nineteenth century – that it was much more ‘deviant’ than it is usually depicted and perceived. Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation explores a wide variety of textual forms, from novels to TV series, from movies and graphic novels to visual art. The scholarly and educational purpose of this study is to stimulate readers to approach neo-Victorianism as a complex cultural phenomenon.

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell
Author: Moniez Baptiste
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527500640

This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.