How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2012-04-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400842182

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Reading Women

Reading Women
Author: Jennifer Phegley
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802089283

Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston. Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.

The Feeling of Reading

The Feeling of Reading
Author: Rachel Ablow
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472051075

The first collection of criticism devoted to the problem of reading in Victorian literature

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book
Author: Michael Patrick Hearn
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2012-02-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307814157

From Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring to Kenneth Grahme’s The Reluctant Dragon and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, here are seventeen classic stories and poems from the golden age of the English fairy tale. Some of them amuse, some enchant, some satirize and criticize, but each one is an expression of the joy of living. Accompanied by illustrations from the original editions of these works this collection will delight readers both young and old. Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

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.

Victorians Undone

Victorians Undone
Author: Kathryn Hughes
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2018-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 142142570X

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
Author: Deirdre David
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2012-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107005132

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.