Victorian Secrecy

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Victorian Secrecy

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

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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 : 1317058410
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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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 Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

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

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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.

Family Secrets

Author : Deborah Cohen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199985634
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)

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Book Synopsis Family Secrets by : Deborah Cohen

Download or read book Family Secrets written by Deborah Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live today in a culture of full disclosure, where tell-all memoirs top the best-seller lists, transparency is lauded, and privacy seems imperiled. But how did we get here? Exploring scores of previously sealed records, Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma. She takes readers inside an Edinburgh town house, where a genteel maiden frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip, a darkening shadow that might betray the girl's Eurasian heritage; to a Liverpool railway platform, where a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption; to a town in the Cotswolds, where a queer vicar brings to his bank vault a diary--sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment--that chronicles his sexual longings. Cohen explores what families in the past chose to keep secret and why. She excavates the tangled history of privacy and secrecy to explain why privacy is now viewed as a hallowed right while secrets are condemned as destructive. In delving into the dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets explores the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors.

Queen Victoria's Secrets

Author : Adrienne Munich
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231104814
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (48 download)

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Book Synopsis Queen Victoria's Secrets by : Adrienne Munich

Download or read book Queen Victoria's Secrets written by Adrienne Munich and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.

Family Secrets

Author : Deborah Cohen
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141959576
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (419 download)

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Book Synopsis Family Secrets by : Deborah Cohen

Download or read book Family Secrets written by Deborah Cohen and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why. In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit and cap. In a town in the Cotswolds, a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions: hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle. In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home.

Secret Selves

Author : Oliver S. Buckton
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807847022
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Secret Selves by : Oliver S. Buckton

Download or read book Secret Selves written by Oliver S. Buckton and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the representation of same-sex desire in Victorian autobiographical writing, Oliver Buckton offers significant new readings of works by such influential 19th-century writers as Edward Carpenter, John Henry Newman, John Addington Symonds, and, in an epilogue, E.M. Forster, and reveals the "confessional" elements of their writings.

The Culture of Secrecy

Author : David Vincent
Publisher : Clarendon Press
ISBN 13 : 9780198203070
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis The Culture of Secrecy by : David Vincent

Download or read book The Culture of Secrecy written by David Vincent and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Culture of Secrecy is the first comprehensive study of the restriction of official information in modern British history. It seeks to understand why secrets have been kept, and how systems of control have been constructed - and challenged - over the past hundred and sixty years. The authortranscends the conventional boundaries of political or social history in his wide-ranging diagnosis of the `British disease' - the legal forms and habits of mind which together have constituted the national tradition of discreet reserve. The chapters range across bureaucrats and ballots, gossip andgay rights, doctors and dole investigators in their exploration of the ethical basis of power in the public, professional, commercial and domestic spheres. Professor Vincent examines concepts such as privacy and confidentiality, honour and integrity, openness and freedom of expression, which haveserved as benchmarks in the development of the liberal state and society.

Searching the Heart

Author : Karen Lystra
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019536063X
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis Searching the Heart by : Karen Lystra

Download or read book Searching the Heart written by Karen Lystra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-06-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In January 1862, Charles Godwin courted Harriet Russell, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the following lines: "Like cadences of inexpressibly sweet music, your kind words came to me: causing every nerve to vibrate as though electrified by some far off strain of heavenly harmony." Almost ten years later, Albert Janin, upon receiving a letter from his beloved Violet Blair, responded with, "I kissed your letter over and over again, regardless of the small-pox epidemic at New York, and gave myself up to a carnival of bliss before breaking the envelope." And in October 1883, Dorothea Lummis wrote candidly to her husband Charles, "I like you to want me, dear, and if I were only with you, I would embrace more than the back of your neck, be sure." In Karen Lystra's richly provocative book, Searching the Heart, we hear the voices of Charles, Albert, Dorothea, and nearly one hundred other nineteenth-century Americans emerge from their surprisingly open, intimate, and emotional love letters. While historians of nineteenth-century America have explored a host of private topics, including courtship, marriage, birth control, sexuality, and sex roles, they have consistently neglected the study of romantic love. Lystra fills this gap by describing in vivid detail what it meant to fall in love in Victorian America. Based on a vast array of love letters, the book reveals the existence of a real openness--even playfulness--between male and female lovers which challenges and expands more traditional views of middle-class private life in Victorian America. Lystra refutes the common belief that Victorian men and women held passionlessness as an ideal in their romantic relationships. Enabling us to enter the hidden world of Victorian lovers, the letters they left behind offer genuine proof of the intensity of their most private interactions, feelings, behaviors, and judgments. Lystra discusses how Victorians anthropomorphized love letters, treating them as actual visits from their lovers, insisting on reading them in seclusion, sometimes kissing them (as Albert does with Violet's), and even taking them to bed. She also explores how courtship rituals--which included the setting and passing of tests of love--succeeded in building unique, emotional bonds between lovers, and how middle-class views of romantic love, which encouraged sharing knowledge and intimacy, gave women more power in the home. Through the medium of love letters, Searching the Heart allows us to enter, unnoticed, the Victorian bedroom and parlor. We will leave with a different view of middle-class Victorian America.

Guarding Life's Dark Secrets

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804763219
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (632 download)

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Book Synopsis Guarding Life's Dark Secrets by :

Download or read book Guarding Life's Dark Secrets written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the elements that have developed as part of the definition of propriety and good behavior, and how the law has acted to protect respectable people and their reputations.

Plots of Opportunity

Author : Albert D. Pionke
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814209483
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (142 download)

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Book Synopsis Plots of Opportunity by : Albert D. Pionke

Download or read book Plots of Opportunity written by Albert D. Pionke and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After surveying England's evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Colins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histoires, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse. --book cover.

The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman

Author : Frederick D. Aquino
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191028088
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman by : Frederick D. Aquino

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman written by Frederick D. Aquino and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Henry Newman (1801-1890) has always inspired devotion. Newman has made disciples as leader of the Catholic revival in the Church of England, an inspiration to fellow converts to Roman Catholicism, a nationally admired preacher and prose-writer, and an internationally recognized saint of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, he has also provoked criticism. The church authorities, both Anglican and Catholic, were often troubled by his words and deeds, and scholars have disputed his arguments and his honesty. Written by a range of international experts, The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman shows how Newman remains important to the fields of education, history, literature, philosophy, and theology. Divided into four parts, part one grounds Newman's works in the places, cultures, and networks of relationships in which he lived. Part two looks at the thinkers who shaped his own thought, while the third part engages critically and appreciatively with themes in his writings. Part four examines how those themes have shaped conversations in the churches and the academy. This Handbook will serve as an important resource to critical and appreciative exploration of the person, writings, controversies, and legacy of Newman.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation

Author : Sarah Wootton
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 113757934X
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation by : Sarah Wootton

Download or read book Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation written by Sarah Wootton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.

Gothic Stories Within Stories

Author : Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476667489
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis Gothic Stories Within Stories by : Clayton Carlyle Tarr

Download or read book Gothic Stories Within Stories written by Clayton Carlyle Tarr and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frame narratives--stories within stories--are featured in nearly every canonical Gothic novel. Sometimes dismissed as a shopworn convention of the genre, frame narratives in fact function as a dynamic basis for imaginative variation and are vital to evaluating the diverse Gothic tradition. The juxtaposition between the everyday "frame world" of the story and the disturbing embedded narrative allows the monstrous to escape textual confines, forcing the reader to experience the reassurance of the ordinary alongside the horror of the uncanny.

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

Author : Michael Connerty
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030768937
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats by : Michael Connerty

Download or read book The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats written by Michael Connerty and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.

Postcolonial George Eliot

Author : Oliver Lovesey
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137332123
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (373 download)

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Book Synopsis Postcolonial George Eliot by : Oliver Lovesey

Download or read book Postcolonial George Eliot written by Oliver Lovesey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot’s works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George Eliot — whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India — and also dismissals of the postcolonial as ahistorical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels. It also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot’s impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xenophobia as well as her interrogation of the make-believe of endings. Drawing on a range of sources from Eugène Bodichon’s Algerian anthropological texts, the Persian journals of John Martyn, and postmodern re-engagements, Postcolonial George Eliot has implications for an understanding of the globalization of English, the decolonization of disciplinarity and periodization, and the roots of present-day conflict in the wider Mediterranean world.

Mockery and Secretism in the Social World of Mark's Gospel

Author : Dietmar Neufeld
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0567062023
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (67 download)

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Book Synopsis Mockery and Secretism in the Social World of Mark's Gospel by : Dietmar Neufeld

Download or read book Mockery and Secretism in the Social World of Mark's Gospel written by Dietmar Neufeld and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having established the context of mockery and shame in Ancient Mediterranean cultures, Dietmar Neufeld shows how Mark presented Jesus as a person with a sense of honour and with a sense of shame, willing to accept the danger of being visible and the mockery it attracted. Neufeld also considers the social functions of ridicule/mockery more broadly as strategies of social sanction, leading to a better understanding of how social, religious, and political practices and discourse variously succeeded or failed in Mark. Finally, Neufeld investigates the author of Mark's preoccupation with 'secrecy', showing that his disposition to secrecy in his narrative heightened when the dangers of scorn and ridicule from crowds or persons became pressing concerns. In a fiercely competitive literary environment where mocking and being mocked were ever present dangers, Mark, in his pursuit of authority gains it by establishing a reputation of possessing authentic, secret knowledge. In short, the so-called secrecy motif is shown to be deployed for specific, strategic reasons that differ from those that have been traditionally advanced.