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Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The concept of ‘generations’ has become a widely discussed area, with recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic revealing our dependence on intergenerational relationships both within and beyond the family. However, the concept can often be misunderstood, which can fuel divisions between age groups rather than generating solutions. This collection introduces and explores the growing field of generational studies, providing a comprehensive overview of its strengths and limitations. With contributions from academics across a range of disciplines, the book showcases the concept’s interdisciplinary potential by applying a generational lens to fields including sociology, literature, history, psychology, media studies and politics. Offering fresh perspectives, this original collection is a valuable addition to the field, opening new avenues for generational thinking.
This volume includes sources relating to a range of social and cultural contexts, including the proliferation of natural history crazes (ferns, aquaria, orchids, etc); debates about the social and environmental impacts of changing land use in town and country; debates about demographics, population, and resources inspired by Thomas Malthus; attempts to preserve landscapes (e.g., The Commons Preservation Society), debates about hunger, poverty, and disease in the countryside, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’, and relating to the Captain Swing and Chartist disturbances; the rise of land Utopianism and rural Utopian community projects; the rise of new forms of rural leisure; aesthet...
An analysis of the builders of the British Empire, how they were represented in popular culture of the day, and how that vision has changed over time. From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world’s surface. The common saying was that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock trading companies such as the East India Company driving British commercial expansion, by the nineteenth century had become, especially after 1857, a state-run endeavour, supported by a powerful military and navy. By the V...
Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous. For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period's economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement-and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings. McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress. Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative. The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature-regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture. These sh apes are not simply progress's others, but rather constituent elements of progress's theorization.
With an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek A number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire's imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different people all over the world challenged the existing harmony between science and religion and threatened traditional biblical ideas about special creation and the timeline of human history. Advances in print culture and voyages of exploration also provided researchers with a wealth of material that contributed to their investigations into humanity’s past. Historicizing Humans takes a critical approach to nineteenth-century human history, as the contributors consider how these histories were shaped by the colonial world, and for various scientific, religious, and sociopolitical purposes. This volume highlights the underlying questions and shared assumptions that emerged as various human developmental theories competed for dominance throughout the British Empire.
Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students. The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russia offers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently ...
This two-volume collection of British primary sources examines institutions such as hotels, inns, arcades, bazaars, co-operatives, shops and department stores in the long nineteenth century, which were often coded as ‘luxurious’. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins. These environments were tied to leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. In addition to addressing the luxurious side of these institutions, including architectural innovation and interior decoration, we also consider the other side of luxury, examining the experience of staff and period debates over the morality of consumption. This edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these ‘temples of luxury’ as they were seen by their contemporaries.
This open access book explores the role of continuity in political processes and practices during the Age of Revolutions. It argues that the changes that took place in the years around 1800 were enabled by different types of continuities across Europe and in the Americas. With historians of modernity tending to emphasise the rise of the new, scholarship has leaned towards an assumption that existing modes of action, thought and practice simply became extinct, irrelevant or at least subordinate to new modes. In contrast, this collection examines continuities between early modern and modern political cultures and organization in Europe and the Americas. Shifting the focus from political modernization, the authors examine the continued relevance of older, often local, practices in (post)revolutionary politics. By doing so, they aim to highlight the role of local political traditions and practices in forging and enabling political change. The book argues that while political change was in fact at the centre of both the old and new polities that emerged in the Age of Revolutions, it coexisted with, and was indeed enabled by, continuities at other levels.
This book traces the transformation of history from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern academic discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how this change inspired Victorians to reconsider what it meant to be a historian. This reconceptualization of the ‘historian’ lies at the heart of this book as it explores how historians strove to forge themselves a collective scholarly persona that reflected and legitimised their new disciplinary status and gave them authority to speak on behalf of the past. The author argues that historians used the persona as a replacement for missing institutional structures, and converted book parts to a sphere where they could...
A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experi...