Spectacles and the Victorians

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Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526161362
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Spectacles and the Victorians by : Gemma Almond-Brown

Download or read book Spectacles and the Victorians written by Gemma Almond-Brown and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists’ attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.

Victorians Undone

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 142142570X
Total Pages : 441 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorians Undone by : Kathryn Hughes

Download or read book Victorians Undone written by Kathryn Hughes and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

The Victorian Freak Show

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Publisher : Cambria Press
ISBN 13 : 1604976535
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Freak Show by : Lillian Craton

Download or read book The Victorian Freak Show written by Lillian Craton and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.

The Spectacle of Intimacy

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400831121
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Spectacle of Intimacy by : Karen Chase

Download or read book The Spectacle of Intimacy written by Karen Chase and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.

Sensational

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Author :
Publisher : Tor Teen
ISBN 13 : 0765399709
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (653 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensational by : Jodie Lynn Zdrok

Download or read book Sensational written by Jodie Lynn Zdrok and published by Tor Teen. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen-year-old Nathalie Baudin, ever-curious reporter at the Paris morgue, is no stranger to death—even discounting the supernatural visions that give her disturbing glimpses into the minds of killers. Paris, 1889. When the Exposition Universelle opens in Paris, Nathalie welcomes a much-needed break from the heartache of her friend's murder. The fair is full of sensational innovations, cultural displays, and marvelous inventions from around the world. But someone is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the guillotine with a gruesome display of their own: beheaded victims in some of the Exposition’s most popular exhibits. Haunted by the past and burdened with new secrets, Nathalie struggles to use her wits and her gift. Yet she and her friends must stop the killer before the macabre display features one of them... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Scenes of Sympathy

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 150171998X
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Scenes of Sympathy by : Audrey Jaffe

Download or read book Scenes of Sympathy written by Audrey Jaffe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

Arctic Spectacles

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780295986807
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (868 download)

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Book Synopsis Arctic Spectacles by : Russell A. Potter

Download or read book Arctic Spectacles written by Russell A. Potter and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century fascination with visual representations of the Arctic is illuminated in this history that weaves together a narrative of the major Arctic expeditions with an account of their public reception through art and mass media. Simultaneous.

Through The Looking Glasses

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Publisher : Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN 13 : 1408712830
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (87 download)

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Book Synopsis Through The Looking Glasses by : Travis Elborough

Download or read book Through The Looking Glasses written by Travis Elborough and published by Little, Brown Book Group. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Elegant and multi-focal. Glorious!' Simon Garfield 'It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes' New Statesman 'Lively, engaging and admirably wide-ranging' The Times 'Fascinating' Observer The humble pair of glasses might just be one of the world's greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses? Through the Looking Glasses traces the fascinating story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids for monkish scribes right through to today's designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers, as well as the silent movie star Harold Lloyd, the rock'n'roller Buddy Holly and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe. This is a book about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us.

Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136740538
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (367 download)

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Book Synopsis Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter by : Marty Gould

Download or read book Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter written by Marty Gould and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Gould argues that it was in the imperial capital’s theatrical venues that the public was put into contact with the places and peoples of empire. Plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access to the imperial periphery; separated from the action by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. But without narrative direction of the sort found in novels and travelogues, theatregoers were left to their own interpretive devices, making imperial drama both a powerful and yet uncertain site for the transmission of official imperial ideologies. Nineteenth-century playwrights fed the public’s interest in Britain’s Empire by producing a wide variety of plays set in colonial locales: India, Australia, and—to a lesser extent—Africa. These plays recreated the battles that consolidated Britain’s hold on overseas territories, dramatically depicted western humanitarian intervention in indigenous cultural practices, celebrated images of imperial supremacy, and occasionally criticized the sexual and material excesses that accompanied the processes of empire-building. An active participant in the real-world drama of empire, the Victorian theatre produced popular images that reflected, interrogated, and reinforced imperial policy. Indeed, it was largely through plays and spectacles that the British public vicariously encountered the sights and sounds of the distant imperial periphery. Empire as it was seen on stage was empire as it was popularly known: the repetitions of character types, plot scenarios, and thematic concerns helped forge an idea of empire that, though largely imaginary, entertained, informed, and molded the theatre-going British public.

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317132521
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain by : Shawn Malley

Download or read book From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain written by Shawn Malley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.

Dandies and Desert Saints

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501720430
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Dandies and Desert Saints by : James Eli Adams

Download or read book Dandies and Desert Saints written by James Eli Adams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book for 1996"While drawing on work in feminism, queer theory, and cultural history, Dandies and Desert Saints challenges scholars to rethink simplistic notions of Victorian manhood. James Eli Adams examines masculine identity in Victorian literature from Thomas Carlyle through Oscar Wilde, analyzing authors who identify the age's ideal of manhood as the power of self-discipline. What distinguishes Adams's book from others in the recent explosion of interest in masculinity is his refusal to approach masculinity primarily in terms of "patriarchy" or "phallogocentrism" or within the binary of homosexualities and heterosexualities.

The Victorian Celebration of Death

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Publisher : Sutton Pub Limited
ISBN 13 : 9780750938730
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (387 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Celebration of Death by : James Stevens Curl

Download or read book The Victorian Celebration of Death written by James Stevens Curl and published by Sutton Pub Limited. This book was released on 2000 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Curl has fashioned an absorbing, lucid and entertaining book describing the Victorian response to the only certainty in life--death. It includes disposal of the dead, landscaped cemeteries funerals and more.

Inventing the Victorians

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0312283261
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Inventing the Victorians by : Matthew Sweet

Download or read book Inventing the Victorians written by Matthew Sweet and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-12-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revises and reevaluates the many concepts and images surrounding the Victorians, a society that was responsible for spin-doctoring, lavish publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, theme parks, crime novels, and scandalous journalism.

Victorians in the Mountains

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317001990
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorians in the Mountains by : Ann C. Colley

Download or read book Victorians in the Mountains written by Ann C. Colley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her compelling book, Ann C. Colley examines the shift away from the cult of the sublime that characterized the early part of the nineteenth century to the less reverential perspective from which the Victorians regarded mountain landscapes. And what a multifaceted perspective it was, as unprecedented numbers of the Victorian middle and professional classes took themselves off on mountaineering holidays so commonplace that the editors of Punch sarcastically reported that the route to the summit of Mont Blanc was to be carpeted. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers; almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley's examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century. In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions to the Himalayas affected people's sense of the sublime, arguing that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her ambitious book is an astute exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender, spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were intruding on what before had seemed inviolable.

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England

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Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804719018
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis The Commodity Culture of Victorian England by : Thomas Richards

Download or read book The Commodity Culture of Victorian England written by Thomas Richards and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and theoretically sophisticated book reveals how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Richards provides a valuable account of the interaction between cultural and business development in Victorian England by focusing on the evolution of advertising. Through an examination of five case studies, ranging from how advertisers employed images of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to their use of images of women just before WWI, he argues that the British developed a new type of culture in the mid and late-19th century--a new way of thinking and living increasingly based upon the possession of material goods, commodities. Revising the findings of some earlier scholars, Richards shows that 'cultural forms of consumerism . . . came into being well before the consumer economy did.' The 50 well-reproduced advertising images greatly enhance the value of this study." --M. Blackford, "Choice"

City of Dreadful Delight

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022608101X
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis City of Dreadful Delight by : Judith R. Walkowitz

Download or read book City of Dreadful Delight written by Judith R. Walkowitz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

The Victorian Eye

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226640787
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Eye by : Chris Otter

Download or read book The Victorian Eye written by Chris Otter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.