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Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interve...
A fascinating study into the development of the Victorian literary profession that examines literary and visual representations of authorship.
This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history. It revisits the origins of many modern debates about aging in the nineteenth century – a period that saw the emergence of cultural and scientific frameworks for the understanding of old age that continue to be influential today. The contributors provide fresh readings of canonical texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thoma...
Thomas Hobbes laid the theoretical groundwork of the nation-state in Leviathan, his tough-minded treatise of 1651. Leviathan 2.0 updates this classic account to explain how modern statehood took shape between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, before it unraveled into the political uncertainty that persists today. Modern states were far from immune to the modernizing forces of war, technology, and ideology. From 1845 to 1880, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina were all reconstituted through territorial violence. Europe witnessed the unification of Germany and Italy, while Asian nations such as Japan tried to mitigate foreign incursions through state-building reform...
Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time. From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and re...
Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re-integrates aesthetics – a much fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular’ over ‘high culture’ – into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word’s root sense of ‘perception’. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, aisthetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore the way in which the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time.
In Rhetoric of the Protestant Sermon in America: Pulpit Discourse at the Turn of the Millennium, ten scholars analyze notable sermons from the fifty-year span between 1965 and 2015, during which the Protestant sermon has undergone significant change in the United States. Contributors examine how this turbulent time period witnessed a variety of important shifts in the arguments, evidences, and rhetorical strategies employed by contemporary preachers. Because religious practice is inextricably tangled in the culture, politics, and economy of its historical situation, the public expression of a faith is certain to move with the times. In their treatment of race, sex, gender, class, and citizenship, sermons apply ancient texts to current events and controversies, often to revealing effect. This collection, thoughtfully edited by Eric C. Miller and Jonathan J. Edwards, demonstrates how the genre of the Protestant sermon has evolved—or resisted evolution—across the years. Scholars of religion, rhetoric, communication, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.
This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of nineteenth-century literature's relationship with science. In particular it brings the physical sciences - physics and chemistry - more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has been the case until now. Writers whose work is discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some well-known in the history of science (including Faraday, Herschel, and Whewell), and a raft of lesser-kno...
'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873). The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people', and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources - classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, treatises on crowd theory - this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism....
The network of freemasons and Masonic lodges in the Middle East is an opaque and mysterious one, and is all too often seen – within the area – as a vanguard for Western purposes of regional domination. But here, Dorothe Sommer explains how freemasonry in Greater Syria at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century actually developed a life of its own, promoting local and regional identities. She stresses that during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, freemasonry was actually one of the first institutions in what is now Syria and Lebanon which overcame religious and sectarian divisions. Indeed, the lodges attracted more participants – such as the members of the Trad and Yaziji Family, Khaireddeen Abdulwahab, Hassan Bayhum, Alexander Barroudi and Jurji Yanni - than any other society or fraternity. Freemasonry in the Ottoman Empire analyses the social and cultural structures of the Masonic network of lodges and their interconnections at a pivotal juncture in the history of the Ottoman Empire, making it invaluable for researchers of the history of the Middle East.