Secrecy And Disclosure In Victorian Fiction

Download Secrecy And Disclosure In Victorian Fiction full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Secrecy And Disclosure In Victorian Fiction ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

Author : Leila Silvana May
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317058410
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction by : Leila Silvana May

Download or read book Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction written by Leila Silvana May and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life," and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.

Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction

Author : María J. López
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 150136555X
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction by : María J. López

Download or read book Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction written by María J. López and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction examines the relation between secrecy and community in a diverse and international range of contemporary fictional works in English. In its concern with what is called 'communities of secrecy', it is fundamentally indebted to the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who have pointed to the fallacies and dangers of identitarian and exclusionary communities, arguing for forms of being-in-common characterized by non-belonging, singularity and otherness. Also drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Matei Calinescu, Frank Kermode and George Simmel, among others, this volume analyses the centrality of secrets in the construction of literary form, narrative sequence and meaning, together with their foundational role in our private and interpersonal lives and the public and political realms. In doing so, it engages with the Derridean ethico-political value of secrecy and Derrida's conception of literature as the exemplary site for the operation of the unconditional secret.

Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

Author : Leila Silvana May
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780367346423
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (464 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction by : Leila Silvana May

Download or read book Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction written by Leila Silvana May and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life," and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.

Reading Victorian Literature

Author : Wolfreys Julian Wolfreys
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474448003
Total Pages : 619 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Reading Victorian Literature by : Wolfreys Julian Wolfreys

Download or read book Reading Victorian Literature written by Wolfreys Julian Wolfreys and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Festschrift honouring J. Hillis Miller and his contribution to Victorian Studies and nineteenth-century criticismProvides stheoretically informed critical essays on nineteenth-century and Victorian literature, by major internationally recognized scholarsChapters provide detailed close readings of the work of J Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, William Michael Rossetti, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Joseph ConradShowcases a major new essay by J Hillis Miller, as well as a previously unpublished interview with MillerReading Victorian Literature provides a critical commentary on major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Dickens to Conrad. At the same time, the assembled group of internationally recognised scholars engages with Miller's work, influence and significance in the study of that era. The volume includes original work by Miller and interviews with him.

Personation Plots

Author : Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438490852
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Personation Plots by : Clayton Carlyle Tarr

Download or read book Personation Plots written by Clayton Carlyle Tarr and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.

Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture

Author : Wendy Parkins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317002105
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by : Wendy Parkins

Download or read book Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture written by Wendy Parkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a growing awareness of the depletion of energy resources and the perils of environmental degradation to the founding of self-sufficient communities and the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period. An emerging sense of the fragility and instability of human and natural resources, and the deeply complex interweaving of the two, led many Victorians to consider how to preserve or protect what they valued, and how individuals, communities (or even nations) could survive and flourish in a world of finite resources. This collection explores not only nascent understandings of sustainability in ecological or environmental contexts but also encompasses consideration of the problem of psychological sustainability and emotional wellbeing in response to the upheavals of modernity. With chapters by scholars working in literary studies, history, cultural studies, and sustainability studies, the volume encompasses a wide diversity of topics, objects, and authors ranging from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. Victorian Sustainability offers new perspectives on debates about sustainability in the present by showing how our current concerns derive from an earlier historical context.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible

Author : Susanne Scholz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190077506
Total Pages : 697 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible by : Susanne Scholz

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible written by Susanne Scholz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible brings together 37 essential essays written by leading international scholars, examining crucial points of analysis within the field of feminist Hebrew Bible studies. Organized into four major areas - globalization, neoliberalism, media, and intersectionality - the essays collectively provide vibrant, relevant, and innovative contributions to the field. The topics of analysis focus heavily on gender and queer identity, with essays touching on African, Korean, and European feminist hermeneutics, womanist and interreligious readings, ecofeminist and animal biblical studies, migration biblical studies, the role of gender binary voices in evangelical-egalitarian approaches, and the examination of scripture in light of trans women's voices. The volume also includes essays examining the Old Testament as recited in music, literature, film, and video games. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible charts a culturally, hermeneutically, and exegetically cutting-edge path for the ongoing development of biblical studies grounded in feminist, womanist, gender, and queer perspectives.

The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Author : Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 164014093X
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by : Laurence W. Mazzeno

Download or read book The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.

Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual

Author : Juan D. Lindau
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538173522
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (381 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual by : Juan D. Lindau

Download or read book Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual written by Juan D. Lindau and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-12-19 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual is an investigation into the impact of the spread of digital technologies and practices, and especially the wide-spread practice of mass surveillance, on privacy and personhood. The book argues that the quest for prediction, certainty, and control lying at the heart of the state’s security apparatus destroys an essential component of human dignity and fundamentally undermines liberalism. The book begins with a discussion of the rise of the digital age and the historical import of this development. Subsequent chapters of the book examine different cultural understandings of privacy, the philosophical discussion of its centrality to human existence, and the form and extent of its legal protection. Lindau explores the reasons behind the rise of mass state surveillance, the modest legal restraints governing its use, and its deployment against activists, protestors, and dissidents and its impact on individuals and on privacy. The book then turns to a discussion of the rise of “surveillance capitalism” and, because this is not just—or even primarily—a U.S. phenomenon, examines the political, social, and other impacts of social media around the world. The book includes a case study discussing the global use of surveillance during the Covid-19 pandemic and the implications of this development before concluding with reflections on the relationship between mass surveillance and liberalism. The book will appeal equally to readers across the social sciences and philosophy, and to students in courses on privacy, surveillance, and democracy. Lindau expertly explores the social, political, and economic consequences of digitization and one of its essential features – the appropriation and “mining” of ever large troves of personal information. The book primarily focuses on the experience of the United States but includes a comparative cross-national and cross-regional analysis and a discussion of the link between different regime types and state surveillance.

Edwardian Culture

Author : Samuel Shaw
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351378457
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (513 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Edwardian Culture by : Samuel Shaw

Download or read book Edwardian Culture written by Samuel Shaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with culture in Britain c.1895-1914. Bringing together essays on literature, art, politics, religion, architecture, marketing, and imperial history, the study highlights the extent to which the culture and politics of Edwardian period were closely intertwined. The book builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to reclaim the term ‘Edwardian’ from prevalent, restrictive usages by venturing beyond the garden party – and the political rally – to uncover some of the terrain that lies between. The essays in the volume – which deal with both famous writers such as J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett, as well as many lesser-known figures – draw attention to the nuanced multiplicity of experience and cultural forms that existed during the period, and highlight the ways in which a closer examination of Edwardian culture complicates our definitions of ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’. The book argues that the Edwardian era, rather than constituting a coda to the Victorian period or a languid pause before modernism shook things up, possessed a compelling and creative tenor of its own.

Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf

Author : Erin Speese
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317130383
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf by : Erin Speese

Download or read book Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf written by Erin Speese and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how the modern novel's complex depictions of parenthood restructure traditional conceptions of the Romantic sublime, Erin K. Johns Speese shows how William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf use related strategies to rewrite the traditional sublime as an intersubjective experience. Speese shows that this reframing depends on the recognition of social objectification and an ethics of reciprocal empathy between mothers and fathers. She juxtaposes traditional aesthetics and Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the sublime object of ideology with recent theoretical work regarding identity, arguing that these modern novelists construct what she terms a "sublime subject," that is, a person who functions in the space of the traditional sublime object. In revealing the possibility of transcendent emotional connection over reason, these novelists critique the objectification of the other in favor of a sublime experience that reveals the subject-shattering power of empathy.

Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions

Author : Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351595326
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions by : Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada

Download or read book Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions written by Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and biographical projects show Pater as fully responsive to the emergence of modern consumer culture and the changes in readership in Britain and the United States. New critical views of rarely studied texts enhance the image of Pater as a cosmopolitan aesthete dialoguing with contemporary culture. Conceptual analysis of his texts brings new light to the aesthetic paradox embodied by Pater, between artistic detachment and immersion in the Heraclitean flux of life. Finally, aestheticism is redefined as proposing new artistic and linguistic synthesis by merging art forms and embracing interart poetics.

The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947

Author : Christine Ferguson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351168304
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (511 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 by : Christine Ferguson

Download or read book The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 written by Christine Ferguson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner

The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes

Author : Aaron M. Kahn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191060585
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes by : Aaron M. Kahn

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes written by Aaron M. Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

Sibling Action

Author : Stefani Engelstein
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231542712
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Sibling Action by : Stefani Engelstein

Download or read book Sibling Action written by Stefani Engelstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous—yet unacknowledged—conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings—often incestuously inclined—negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not quite same and not quite other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

Victorian Secrecy

Author : Denise Tischler Millstein
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317002148
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Victorian Secrecy by : Denise Tischler Millstein

Download or read book Victorian Secrecy written by Denise Tischler Millstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether commercial, personal, political, professional, or spiritual, knowledge was capital for the Victorians in their ongoing project of constructing a modern information-based society. Victorian Secrecy explores the myriad ways in which knowledge was both zealously accumulated and jealously guarded by individuals, institutions, and government entities in Victorian Britain. Offering a wide variety of critical approaches and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors examine secretive actors with respect to a broad range of subjects, including the narrator in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, John Henry Newman's autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, modes of detection in Bleak House, the secret history of Harriet Martineau's role in the repeal of the Corn Law, and Victorian stage magicians. Taken together, the essays provide a richly textured account of which modes of hiding and revealing articulate secrets in Victorian literature and culture; how social relations are formed and reformed in relationship to secrecy; and what was at stake individually, aesthetically, and culturally in the Victorians' clandestine activities.

Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

Author : Leila Silvana May
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317058429
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction by : Leila Silvana May

Download or read book Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction written by Leila Silvana May and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life," and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.