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Life Writing and Victorian Culture
In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, experts from Britain and the United States in the fields of nineteenth-century literature, and social and cultural history explore new directions in the field of Victorian life writing. Chapters examine a varied yet interrelated range of genres, from the biography and autobiography, to the relatively neglected diary, collective biography, and obituary. Reflecting the rich research being conducted in this area, the contributors link life writing to the formation of gendered and class-based identities; the politics of the Victorian family; and the broader professional, political, colonial, and literary structures in which social and kinship relations were implicated. A wide variety of Victorian works are considered, from the diary of the Radical Samuel Bamford, to the diary of the homosexual George Ives; from autobiographies of professional men to collective biographies of eminent women. Embracing figures as diverse as Gandhi, Wilde, and Bradlaugh, the collection explores the way in which narratives contested one another in a society that devoted an abundance of cultural energy to writing about, and reading of, lives.
Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914
A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Based on working-class autobiography, the book challenges dominant assumptions about absent or 'feckless' fathers, and reintegrates the paternal figure within the emotional life of families. Locating autobiography within broader social and cultural commentary, Julie-Marie Strange considers material culture, everyday practice, obligation, duty and comedy as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives. Emphasising the importance of separating men as husbands from men as fathers, Strange explores how emotional ties were formed between fathers and their children, the models of fatherhood available to working-class men, and the ways in which fathers interacted with children inside and outside the home. She explodes the myth that working-class interiorities are inaccessible or unrecoverable, and locates life stories in the context of other sources, including social surveys, visual culture and popular fiction.
The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture
This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture – canonical literature, children’s fiction, scientific texts, and writing by children – to argue that precocity challenges the idea of progress. It considers how practitioners of literature and science from Wordsworth to Freud represented human development, and the way in which Darwin’s “non-progressive model of evolution” troubled the existing model of progression by stages (from childhood inexperience to adult maturity and understanding). Roisín Laing argues that the precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress, and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development. The idea represented by the precocious child in Victorian culture – that the adult is not necessarily an improvement on the child, the human not necessarily an improvement on the ape – still troubles us today.
Thirteen Mercies, Three Kills
Cristina Mera Richards's father is the latest victim of reaper Edgar Verner. Verner and the harvesters have been preying on the hovertown of New Bayou for too long, and someone has to put an end to their carnage. Cristina Mera decides she is that someone, but because Verner is an immortal alkemist, she will have to get creative when it comes to destroying him. And the stakes only get higher when Verner decides he wants Cristina Mera—and her unique powers—as his apprentice and under his control. As a changeling, Cristina Mera can see and hear the spirits of the dead. It's an ability she uses to free souls from suffering when their bodies become desiccated by the withering sickness—and one Verner intends to exploit. A way out for Cristina Mera appears in the form of Wanderer Alkemist Nikola Skazat—a woman with a long past and many secrets—whose beauty and charm entice Cristina Mera as much as the opportunity for her help against Verner. As Nikola's apprentice, Cristina Mera might find a way to save her hovertown. But she could lose her heart along the way—or even her life.
The Woman and the Hour
Roberts situates Martineau's controversial writing in its historical context and presents a sophisticated scholarly analysis of their predominantly hostile reception.
Anti-feminism in the Victorian Novel
The beginnings of the modern idea of feminism are usually traced to the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Since then, women's emancipation has been a constantly debated and topical subject. This series entitled Victorian and Edwardian Anti-Feminism will present the other side of the debate - anti-feminism - more or less obviously through novels and other writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Feminism in the Victorian Novel is a collection of five rare novels depicting various aspects of the anti-feminist ideology that was making a strong stand against the increasingly widespread movement towards feminism and suffrage in late 19th-c...
