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'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.
This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.Over the past thirty years, much literary theory has approached literature in general, and Victorian fiction in particular, in a spirit of suspicion. It has tried to purge criticism of the human subject, and of that distinctively human faculty, sympathy. Reading in a contrary, sympathetic mode, Lowe turns the tables on theoretical orthodoxy by submitting some of its central premises to the sympathetic suggestions of novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik. Their explorations of such diverse issues as history, imagination, individual rights, family, and social responsibility, highlight sympathy as a cornerstone of human nature and humane conduct. Lowe argues that not only literary theory, but our culture more generally, would greatly profit by opening itself up to a sympathetic exchange of ideas with another age, and giving Victorian intimations of sympathy a sympathetic hearing.Lowes exploration of sympathy as part of the dynamics of reading will be of interest to academics and students working on fiction in all periods, and especially to those concerned with aesthetic and critical theory. Her investigation of the role of sympathy in a range of nineteenth-century cultural debates, in particular in relation to gender and the family, should also interest cultural historians. The engaging argumentative momentum of Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy will appeal to anyone interested in why we do, and should, go on reading Victorian fiction.
'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.
John Keble had an immense influence on nineteenth-century literature and culture. A founding figure of the Oxford Movement, he was mythologized as the living embodiment of Christian ideals. His 1827 volume of verse The Christian Year was the best-selling book of poetry in the Victorian era while his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry were highly influential. Those indebted to his ideas include figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson. Despite his evident importance, Keble?s social, political and cultural impacts on his times have, until recently, been significantly underestimated. This interdisciplinary volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the importance of Keble?s life and work. It provides an entirely fresh perspective on Keble?s writings, bringing critical work on Keble into the twenty-first century, in particular, demonstrating the importance of his contribution to nineteenth-century literature, politics and theology. Including works by a number of prominent scholars, John Keble in Context provides a wide range of perspectives on Keble?s place in politics and religion, his writings and his influence on his literary heirs and successors. This unique and timely volume offers the first major reassessment of Keble?s work for several decades, and a comprehensive introduction to this key figure. John Keble in Context will appeal to students of Victorian literature, history, religion and culture.
This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems.This study is based on a balanced method of literary analysis and theological evaluation of the texts, avoiding free theological association as well as hermeneutical mixing with the non-literary writings of Dostoevsky. The study starts by discussing the main recent studies of Dostoevsky's religion. It then describes Dostoevsky's original literary method in dealing with religious issues - his use of paradoxes, contradictions and irony. 'Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky' ultimately deconstructs Dostoevsky as an Orthodox writer, and reveals that the Christian themes in his novels are not ecclesiastical or confessionally theological ones, but instead are expressions of a fundamentally Christian anthropology and biblical ethics.
The first ever book on Mumbai written in the Marathi language, this is a historically fascinating and revealing urban biography of nineteenth-century India.
In the field of literary and cultural studies, interest in nineteenth-century biology has been substantial for the last 20 years, yet the focus has been almost exclusively on evolutionary theory, neglecting other branches of nineteenth-century biology. This collection corrects that imbalance, shedding light on other discoveries in cell biology, physiology, neurology and virology. It examines the issue of authority in science, demonstrating the social ?embeddedness? of the natural sciences, and gender issues. It also shows how scientists and creative writers drew on a common imagination as well as narrative techniques and stylistic devices; indeed, often inspired by the same subjects. This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.
Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, 'Mapping the Nation' offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870?1920.
Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ''Mapping the Nation'' offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870-1920. Centring upon the ''mapping'' of India - both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal - this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England, to illustrate how the variety of India''s poetical imagining corresponded to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography.
'Bakhtin and his Others' offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin's ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality, research into his theoretical backgrounds, and case studies where these insights are employed in literary analysis.
Love is often called a leap of faith. But can faith be described as a leap of love? In 'Touching God: Hopkins and Love', Duc Dau argues that the conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Roman Catholicism was one of his most romantic acts.'Touching God' is the first book devoted to love in the writings of Hopkins, illuminating our understanding of him as a romantic poet. Discussions of desire in Hopkins' poetry have focused on his tortured and unrequited attraction to men. In contrast, Dau builds on existing queer and conventional readings of the poet's work by turning to theories of mutual touch propounded by Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the process, she uncovers the desire Hopkins actively cultivated and celebrated: his love for Christ. By analysing Hopkins' writings alongside his literary, philosophical and theological influences, she demonstrates that this love is what he called 'eros' or 'amor'.Dau argues that descriptions of the body and its acts of tenderness - notably touching - played a vital role in the poet's depictions of spiritual eroticism. By forging a new way of reading desire and the body in Hopkins' writings, this work offers fresh interpretations of his poetry, and contributes to contemporary interest surrounding the relationship between love, sexuality and spirituality.
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world, each analysing an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. It thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that came to be known as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections betweens Chekhov''s legacy and the Russian culture of that period.
The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. Guidebooks and manuals were produced in large numbers to help readers negotiate new cultural phenomena, and their concerns including image-making, diet, stress, lack of time, and the frustrations of public transport betray contemporary political tensions and social anxieties alongside the practical advice offered. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period, as writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Hugo and Zola embraced modernity and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, Changing France shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.
The collection is comprised of twelve scholarly essays written by leading Chekhov specialists from around the world. Each essay analyses an interpretation of Chekhov by one of three prominent Russian thinkers of the Silver Age of Russian culture - Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov. This volume is particularly unique and valuable in that its main focus is placed on the perception of Chekhov''s art by those who existed on the border between literary criticism and philosophy. This is complemented by a literary critique of their accounts, and therefore remains faithful to Chekhov''s poetics. The collection thus examines the hitherto under-researched relationship between the origins and the results of the cultural phase that we now refer to as the Silver Age, and focuses specifically on the complex connections between Chekhov''s legacy and the Russian culture of that period. Through its stress on the philosophical perception of Chekhov, this book offers a thematically consistent and systematic revelation of new dimensions to Chekhov''s creative heritage. The essays are supplemented by biographical accounts of Rozanov, Merezhkovskii and Shestov.
In an age of radical transformation, the Victorians were caught between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. In the face of such a dizzying present, connecting with their past became for the Victorians a kind of survival strategy - this nostalgia took forms as diverse as their obsession with history and origins; the religious revivalism of the Oxford Movement; and the new Houses of Parliament, built in 1834, whose design looked longingly back to the Middle Ages.This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire. This beautifully written meditation provides a vivid, compelling and authoritative portrait of an era that, in the face of an exhilarating and menacing present, longingly embraced the stability and comfort of a past both real and imagined.
'Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement' challenges accepted scholarly wisdom regarding the life, personality and work of this once-famous Victorian scholar and churchman.
¿Bakhtin and his Others¿ offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin¿s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality, research into his theoretical backgrounds, and case studies where these insights are employed in literary analysis.
An insightful and illuminating collection of essays on the political and cultural dynamics of travel literature in the nineteenth century.
The first ever book on Mumbai written in the Marathi language, this is a historically fascinating and revealing urban biography of nineteenth-century India.
Bestsellers in Nineteenth Century America seeks to produce for students novels, poems and other printed material that sold extremely well when they first appeared in the United States.
The Constitution of Shelleys Poetry is a close philosophical reading of Prometheus Unbound from the perspective of the argument or drama of language played out in its pages. At its heart a four-chapter reading of Prometheus Unbound, the book is punctuated with readings of other Shelley works and prefaced with two earlier chapters: one on 'Mont Blanc' and 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', the companion poems inaugurating Shelleys poetic maturity; the other on 'Ode to the West Wind' originally published with Prometheus Unbound and here represented as 'signature' Shelley. The books one most distinguishing feature, from which several others derive, is its bringing the power and pertinence of Stanley Cavells thought to Shelleys poetry and to his explicitly articulated philosophical interest in language. The book urges and practises close reading, but it provides philosophical grounds for this ostensibly old-fashioned approach, and it implicitly proposes an understanding of language very different from those now most generally assumed in literary studies. The books bringing of Cavells thought to Shelleys poetry would make two related but distinguishable contributions. There is, first of all, the reading of Shelleys poetry, which is new and persuasive both in many of its local moments and in its overall thrust. Second, there is the practical demonstration of the relevance and yield of Cavells thought for literary studies.
This volume is both an essential resource for undergraduates and graduates studying Victorian and Decadent literature and an instructive work for enthusiastic readers of verse. The wide span of the 1872-1900 epoch enables readers to appreciate in great depth the literary developments that led to the fin de siècle, unlike most studies of this period, which focus solely on the 1890s, with no relation to cultural and historical developments in the previous two important decades.
A fascinating and comprehensive review of the position of the Rossettis within the social and cultural maelstrom of Victorian London.
The essays in this volume demonstrate how the Rossettis ? from the celebrated Dante Gabriel and Christina to the comparatively neglected Maria and William ? drew upon a shared cultural experience, and describe how each contributed to the intellectual debates of the age and played a substantial role in their various fields. Bringing together significant contributions from some of the most renowned experts on the Rossettis, Outsiders Looking In provides important new perspectives on this talented family and their brilliant legacy.
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