Angelic Airs Subversive Songs

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Angelic Airs/subversive Songs

Author : Alisa Marie Clapp
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (376 download)

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Book Synopsis Angelic Airs/subversive Songs by : Alisa Marie Clapp

Download or read book Angelic Airs/subversive Songs written by Alisa Marie Clapp and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study extends the critical discussion on nineteenth-century aesthetics to include music, a rarely studied yet vital Victorian artform. I argue that Victorians concurrently idealized music as a transcendent corrective to social ills and feared it as a subversive context for these ills. In Chapter One, I examine Victorian constructions of music to promote patriotism, Christianity, culture, and domestic harmony, and suggest how often these goals were undermined by political tensions in song texts or "immoral sensuality" promoted by the "spectacle" of live music-making. Chapter Two explores representations of music by a variety of Victorian novelists and poets. Turning to specific writers and musical genres, I first examine how Elizabeth Gaskell authenticates the idealization of folk music when depicting folk-song entertainment strengthening communities of women; she does so, however, by expunging authentic, rebellious lyrics (Chapter Three). Thomas Hardy's novels depict the Darwinian sexual component of folk music being stifled by middle-class prudery, challenging by extension the middle-class agenda of Folk-Song Revivalists (Chapter Four). One of the period's most musically engaged writers, George Eliot complicates Victorian idealizations of religious music in her first novel, Adam Bede. Eliot overtly honors the Methodist hymn tradition through her preacher, Dinah Morris, yet shows how easily her hymns are altered into love songs, suggesting the unstable nature of religious music (Chapter Five). In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot depicts Maggie Tulliver as an idealized pastoral musician who is eventually overwhelmed by middle-class aesthetics which position the pastoral tradition firmly within a class system, not Nature, and women, like Maggie, as the object of pastoral love songs (Chapter Six). In my last chapter, I read against common interpretations of Daniel Deronda by arguing that Gwendolen Harleth's musical ambitions are thwarted by the musician-hero, Herr Klesmer, who yet denies his profession's close ties with financial success and sexual appeal, as Eliot ultimately becomes disillusioned with idealized music.

Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs

Author : Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs by : Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

Download or read book Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs written by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre examines Victorian constructions of music to advance patriotism, Christianity, culture and domestic harmony, and suggests that often these goals were undermined by political tensions in song texts or immoral sensuality in the spectacle of live music-making.

The Physiology of the Novel

Author : Nicholas Dames
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199208964
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis The Physiology of the Novel by : Nicholas Dames

Download or read book The Physiology of the Novel written by Nicholas Dames and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novelcritics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, andsoothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.

The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel

Author : Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317021223
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel by : Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg

Download or read book The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel written by Cecilia Bjorken-Nyberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of music-making in the Edwardian novel, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg argues that the invention and development of the player piano had a significant effect on the perception, performance and appreciation of music during the period. In contrast to existing devices for producing music mechanically such as the phonograph and gramophone, the player piano granted its operator freedom of individual expression by permitting the performer to modify the tempo. Because the traditional piano was the undisputed altar of domestic and highly gendered music-making, Björkén-Nyberg suggests, the potential for intervention by the mechanical piano's operator had a subversive effect on traditional notions about the status of the musical work itself and about the people who were variously defined by their relationship to it. She examines works by Dorothy Richardson, E.M. Forster, Henry Handel Richardson, Max Beerbohm and Compton Mackenzie, among others, contending that Edwardian fiction with music as a subject undermined the prevalent antithesis, expressed in contemporary music literature, between a nineteenth-century conception of music as a means of transcendence and the increasing mechanisation of music as represented by the player piano. Her timely survey of the player piano in the context of Edwardian commercial and technical discourse draws on a rich array of archival materials to shed new light on the historically conditioned activity of music-making in early twentieth-century fiction.

Sounding Bodies

Author : Shannon Draucker
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143849839X
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Sounding Bodies by : Shannon Draucker

Download or read book Sounding Bodies written by Shannon Draucker and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

Figures of the Imagination

Author : Roger Hansford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131713530X
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Figures of the Imagination by : Roger Hansford

Download or read book Figures of the Imagination written by Roger Hansford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home and were shared by many consumers. Roger Hansford explores relationships between music produced in the early 1800s for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance, offering a new view of romanticism in British print culture. He surveys romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Edward Bulwer and Charles Kingsley in the period 1790–1850, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments. He explores the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature, treating both types of source and their intersection as examples of material culture. Hansford’s intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures – including the minstrel, fairies, mermaids, ghosts, and witches, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice – the identities of which remained consistent as influence passed between the art forms. While romance authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of performers who read romance fiction.

The Brontës in the World of the Arts

Author : Sandra Hagan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351893505
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis The Brontës in the World of the Arts by : Sandra Hagan

Download or read book The Brontës in the World of the Arts written by Sandra Hagan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although previous scholarship has acknowledged the importance of the visual arts to the Brontës, relatively little attention has been paid to the influence of music, theatre, and material culture on the siblings' lives and literature. This interdisciplinary collection presents new research on the Brontës' relationship to the wider world of the arts, including their relationship to the visual arts. The contributors examine the siblings' artistic ambitions, productions, and literary representations of creative work in both amateur and professional realms. Also considered are re-envisionings of the Brontës' works, with an emphasis on those created in the artistic media the siblings themselves knew or practiced. With essays by scholars who represent the fields of literary studies, music, art, theatre studies, and material culture, the volume brings together the strongest current research and suggests areas for future work on the Brontës and their cultural contexts.

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900

Author : Phyllis Weliver
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351744488
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900 by : Phyllis Weliver

Download or read book Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900 written by Phyllis Weliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first publushed in 2000. Phyllis Weliver investigates representations of female musicians in British novels from 1860 to 1900 with regard to changing gender roles, musical practices and scientific discourses. During this time women were portrayed in complex and nuanced ways as they played and sang in family drawing rooms. Women in the 19th century were judged on their manners, appearance, language and other accomplishments such as sewing or painting, but music stood out as an area where women were encouraged to take centre stage and demonstrate their genteel education, graceful movements and self-expression. However within the novels of the Victorian were begining to move away from portraying the musical accomplishments of middle- and upper-class women as feminine and worthwhile towards depicting musical women as truly dangerous. This book explores the reasons for this reaction and the way labels and images were constructed to show extremes of behaviour, and it looks at whether the fiction was depicting the real trends in music at the time.

The Lives of Machines

Author : Tamara S. Ketabgian
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472900358
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lives of Machines by : Tamara S. Ketabgian

Download or read book The Lives of Machines written by Tamara S. Ketabgian and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Lives of Machines is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine." ---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University Today we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under pressure." The Lives of Machines investigates how Victorian technoculture came to shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian literature and culture. Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities in their own right. The Lives of Machines thus offers an alternate cultural history that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology, and the posthuman. The Lives of Machines will be of interest to students of British literature and history, history of science and of technology, novel studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern cultural studies. Cover image: "Power Loom Factory of Thomas Robinson," from Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), frontispiece. DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England

Author : Julia Grella O'Connell
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317091531
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England by : Julia Grella O'Connell

Download or read book Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England written by Julia Grella O'Connell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature; indeed, the ubiquity of the trope galvanized the Victorian conscience and acted as a spur to social reform. In some notable examples, Julia Grella O’Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian fallen woman was associated with music, reviving an ancient tradition conflating the practice of music with sin and the abandonment of music with holiness. The prominence of music symbolism in the socially-committed, quasi-religious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, and in the Catholic-Wagnerian novels of George Moore, gives evidence of the survival of a pictorial language linking music with sin and conversion, and shows, even more remarkably, that this language translated fairly easily into the cultural lexicon of Victorian Britain. Drawing upon music iconography, art history, patristic theology, and sensory theory, Grella O’Connell investigates female fallenness and its implications against the backdrop of the social and religious turbulence of the mid-nineteenth century.

Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time

Author : Andrew Radford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351879340
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time by : Andrew Radford

Download or read book Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time written by Andrew Radford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic exploration of Thomas Hardy's imaginative assimilation of particular Victorian sciences, this study draws on and swells the widening current of scholarly attention now being paid to the cultural meanings compacted and released by the nascent 'sciences of man' in the nineteenth century. Andrew Radford here situates Hardy's fiction and poetry in a context of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the Victorian age to accommodate an immense range of literal and figurative 'excavations' then taking place. Combining literary close readings with broad historical analyses, he explores Hardy's artistic response to geological, archaeological and anthropological findings. In particular, he analyzes Hardy's lifelong fascination with the doctrine of 'survivals,' a term coined by E.B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871) to denote customs, beliefs and practices persisting in isolation from their original cultural context. Radford reveals how Hardy's subtle reworking of Tylor's doctrine offers a valuable insight into the inter-penetration of science and literature during this period. An important aspect of Radford's research focuses on lesser known periodical literature that grew out of a British amateur antiquarian tradition of the nineteenth century. His readings of Hardy's literary notebooks disclose the degree to which Hardy's own considerable scientific knowledge was shaped by the middlebrow periodical press. Thus Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time raises questions not only about the reception of scientific ideas but also the creation of nonspecialist forms of scientific discourse. This book represents a genuinely new perspective for Hardy studies.

What is a Woman to Do?

Author : Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783039111169
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis What is a Woman to Do? by : Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi

Download or read book What is a Woman to Do? written by Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2011 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology contributes to a scholarly understanding of the aesthetics and economics of female artistic labour in the Victorian period. It maps out the evolution of the Woman Question in a number of areas, including the status and suitability of artistic professions for women, their engagement with new forms of work and their changing relationship to the public sphere. The wealth of material gathered here - from autobiographies, conduct manuals, diaries, periodical articles, prefaces and travelogues - traces the extensive debate on women's art, feminism and economics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Combining for the first time nineteenth-century criticism on literature and the visual arts, performance and craftsmanship, the selected material reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from idleness to serious occupation. The distinctive primary sources explore the impact of artistic labour upon perceptions of feminine sensibility and aesthetics, the conflicting views of women towards the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they encompassed vocations, trades and professions, and the complex relationship between paid labour and female fame and notoriety.

British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900

Author : Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113479620X
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 by : Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

Download or read book British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 written by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.

Auto-poetica

Author : Darby Lewes
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739116517
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Auto-poetica by : Darby Lewes

Download or read book Auto-poetica written by Darby Lewes and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of art written about an artist creating a work of art is, in a sense, a novel in which the author is a character. The essays in this collection examine nineteenth-century texts that attempted to merge fiction and reality into a unified whole.

British Women Short Story Writers

Author : Emma Young
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474401392
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis British Women Short Story Writers by : Emma Young

Download or read book British Women Short Story Writers written by Emma Young and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.

Victorian Verse

Author : Lee Behlman
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031296966
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (312 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Verse by : Lee Behlman

Download or read book Victorian Verse written by Lee Behlman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-04 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.

The Age of Analogy

Author : Devin Griffiths
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421420775
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Analogy by : Devin Griffiths

Download or read book The Age of Analogy written by Devin Griffiths and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did literature shape nineteenth-century science? Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins’ writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study of antiquity, or “comparative historicism,” that emerged outside of traditional histories. It flourished instead in literary forms like the realist novel and the elegy, as well as in natural histories that explored the continuity between past and present forms of life. Nurtured by imaginative cross-disciplinary descriptions of the past—from the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson—this novel understanding of history fashioned new theories of natural transformation, encouraged a fresh investment in social history, and explained our intuition that environment shapes daily life. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence and contemporary models of scientific and literary networks, The Age of Analogy explores the critical role analogies play within historical and scientific thinking. Griffiths also presents readers with a new theory of analogy that emphasizes language's power to foster insight into nature and human society. The first comparative treatment of the Darwins’ theories of history and their profound contribution to the study of both natural and human systems, this book will fascinate students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the history of science.