Morality In The Nineteenth Century

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Useful Knowledge

Author : Alan Rauch
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822383152
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Useful Knowledge by : Alan Rauch

Download or read book Useful Knowledge written by Alan Rauch and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Rauch discusses both the influence and the ideology of knowledge in terms of how it affected nineteenth-century anxieties about moral responsibility and religious beliefs. Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, the book focusses on the growing importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. From discussions of Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rauch paints a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century culture and addresses issues related to the proliferation of knowledge and the moral issues of this time period. Useful Knowledge touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights on our ongoing preoccupation with knowledge. Useful Knowledge will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth century history, literature, culture, the mediation of knowledge, and the history of science.

Women and the Work of Benevolence

Author : Lori D. Ginzberg
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300052541
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (525 download)

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Book Synopsis Women and the Work of Benevolence by : Lori D. Ginzberg

Download or read book Women and the Work of Benevolence written by Lori D. Ginzberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant women were fervent in their efforts to "do good." Rhetoric--especially in the antebellum years--proclaimed that virtue was more pronounced in women than in men and praised women for their benevolent influence, moral excellence, and religious faith. In this book, Lori D. Ginzberg examines a broad spectrum of benevolent work performed by middle- and upper-middle-class women from the 1820s to 185 and offers a new interpretation of the shifting political contexts and meanings of this long tradition of women's reform activism. During the antebellum period, says Ginzberg, the idea of female moral superiority and the benevolent work it supported contained both radical and conservative possibilities, encouraging an analysis of femininity that could undermine male dominance as well as guard against impropriety. At the same time, benevolent work and rhetoric were vehicles for the emergence of a new middle-class identity, one which asserts virtue--not wealth--determined status. Ginzberg shows how a new generation that came of age during the 1850s and the Civil War developed new analyses of benevolence and reform. By post-bellum decades, the heirs of antebellum benevolence referred less to a mission of moral regeneration and far more to a responsibility to control the poor and "vagrant," signaling the refashioning of the ideology of benevolence from one of gender to one of class. According to Ginzberg, these changing interpretations of benevolent work throughout the century not only signal an important transformation in women's activists' culture and politics but also illuminate the historical development of American class identity and of women's role in constructing social and political authority.

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians

Author : Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781850431664
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (316 download)

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Book Synopsis Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians by : Gertrude Himmelfarb

Download or read book Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians written by Gertrude Himmelfarb and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these brilliant essays, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America s most respected scholars of Victorian thought and culture, explores the many facets, public and private, of the Victorian idea of morality. Incisively and provocatively she illuminates the "moral imagination" of the Victorians, "the imagination that treasured the complexity of the heart and mind and that sought, by aesthetic means as well as ethical, to adorn and enhance rather than destroy the 'decent drapery of life.'" The conventional view of Victorianism a Family Shakespeare purged of indelicacies, piano legs sheathed in pantaloons, and the works of male and female authors chastely residing on separate shelves gives way to the subtle and sympathetic analysis of an ethos that combined a profound sense of social and moral responsibility with a remarkable tolerance for idiosyncrasy and individuality. Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians invites us to reconsider the complex and colorful panorama of ideas and attitudes, beliefs and behavior, that goes under the name of Victorianism and it reconsiders well our own relation to that much abused and misunderstood culture. "An important book that deserves a wide readership. It deserves to be read for the critical quality of Miss Himmelfarb s mind and the constant questioning of fashionable attitudes. One does not have to agree with her to enjoy the characteristic sharpness of her writing, or the characteristic breadth of her reading." New York Times Book Review. "A collection of extraordinarily intelligent essays, held together not by a single thread of argument but by the sustained moral imagination of an acute student of nineteenth-century life and thought....Miss Himmelfarb s essays make clear that there was nothing wrong with either the Victorians morality or their imaginations." National Review."

Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century English Lunatic Asylum

Author : Rosemary Golding
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030785254
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century English Lunatic Asylum by : Rosemary Golding

Download or read book Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century English Lunatic Asylum written by Rosemary Golding and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the role played by music within asylums, the participation of staff and patients in musical activity, and the links drawn between music, health, and wellbeing. In the first part of the book, the author draws on a wide range of sources to investigate the debates around moral management, entertainment, and music for patients, as well as the wider context of music and mental health. In the second part, a series of case studies bring to life the characters and contexts involved in asylum music, selected from a range of public and private institutions. From asylum bands to chapel choirs, smoking concerts to orchestras, the rich variety of musical activity presents new perspectives on music in everyday life. Aspects such as employment practices, musicians’ networks and the purchase and maintenance of musical instruments illuminate the ‘business’ of music as part of moral management. As a source of entertainment and occupation, a means of solace and self-control, and as a device for social gatherings and contact with the outside world, the place of music in the asylum offers valuable insight into its uses and meanings in nineteenth-century England.

Histories of Sexuality

Author : Stephen Garton
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317489012
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (174 download)

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Book Synopsis Histories of Sexuality by : Stephen Garton

Download or read book Histories of Sexuality written by Stephen Garton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first assessment of one of the most rapidly expanding fields of research: the history of sexuality. From the early efforts of historians to work out a model for sexual history, to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault, to the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism, to the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history - we now have vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. 'Histories of Sexuality' highlights the key historical moments and issues: pederasty and cultures of male passivity in ancient Greece and Rome; the impact of early Christianity and ideals of renunciation on the sexual cultures of late antiquity; the sustained existence of homosexual cultures in medieval and renaissance Europe; the "invention" of homosexuality and heterosexuality in eighteenth century Europe and America; the truth behind Victorian sexual repression; the work of reformers and scientists such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians

Author : Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780571139521
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians by : Gertrude Himmelfarb

Download or read book Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians written by Gertrude Himmelfarb and published by . This book was released on 1986-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these brilliant essays, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most respected scholars of Victorian thought and culture, explores the many facets, public and private, of the Victorian idea of morality. Incisively and provocatively she illuminates the moral imagination of the Victorians, the imagination that treasured the complexity of the heart and mind and that sought, by aesthetic means as well as ethical, to adorn and enhance rather than destroy the 'decent drapery of life.' The conventional view of Victorianism-a Family Shakespeare purged of indelicacies, piano legs sheathed in pantaloons, and the works of male and female authors chastely residing on separate shelves-gives way to the subtle and sympathetic analysis of an ethos that combined a profound sense of social and moral responsibility with a remarkable tolerance for idiosyncrasy and individuality. Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians invites us to reconsider the complex and colorful panorama of ideas and attitudes, beliefs and behavior, that goes under the name of Victorianism-and it reconsiders well our own relation to that much abused and misunderstood culture.An important book that deserves a wide readership. It deserves to be read for the critical quality of Miss Himmelfarb's mind and the constant questioning of fashionable attitudes. One does not have to agree with her to enjoy the characteristic sharpness of her writing, or the characteristic breadth of her reading.-New York Times Book Review. A collection of extraordinarily intelligent essays, held together not by a single thread of argument but by the sustained moral imagination of an acute student of nineteenth-century life and thought...Miss Himmelfarb's essays make clear that there was nothing wrong with either the Victorians' morality or their imaginations.-National Review.

Moral Taste

Author : Marjorie Garson
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 0802091385
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Moral Taste by : Marjorie Garson

Download or read book Moral Taste written by Marjorie Garson and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Taste is a study of the ideological work done by the equation of good taste and moral refinement in a selection of nineteenth-century writings.

John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption

Author : David Melville Craig
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813925585
Total Pages : 446 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption by : David Melville Craig

Download or read book John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption written by David Melville Craig and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

The Burdens of Perfection

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801461316
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Burdens of Perfection by : Andrew H. Miller

Download or read book The Burdens of Perfection written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods. Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

The Structure of Moral Revolutions

Author : Robert Baker
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262043084
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis The Structure of Moral Revolutions by : Robert Baker

Download or read book The Structure of Moral Revolutions written by Robert Baker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of “absolute” moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.

Nineteenth-Century Morality and "The Decline in the Sentiment of Sex". Henry James’s "The Bostonians" and Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre"

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Author : Sabine Mercer
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3656930147
Total Pages : 34 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (569 download)

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Book Synopsis Nineteenth-Century Morality and "The Decline in the Sentiment of Sex". Henry James’s "The Bostonians" and Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre" by : Sabine Mercer

Download or read book Nineteenth-Century Morality and "The Decline in the Sentiment of Sex". Henry James’s "The Bostonians" and Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre" written by Sabine Mercer and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, James Cook University (James Cook University), course: Women in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel, language: English, abstract: The aftermath of the traumas of the American Civil War saw an unleashing of intellectual, cultural and economic forces, which accelerated the rate of transformation in American society. In post-Reconstruction America, after so much controversy about slavery, social and political reformers climbed on the platform to agitate on behalf of the Feminist movement in an “air [that] was thick with theory and controversy about women” (Habegger 9). When Henry James outlined his general idea for "The Bostonians" (1886) in his notebook-entry of 1883, he referred to this new ideology, which he perceived as being responsible for the perversion of the confused and uprooted young American society: I wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf. The undoing of the differences between man and woman and the blurring of the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine and, in particular, the subordination of the masculine hegemony by “the stirrings of feminism in late nineteenth-century Boston” (Lansdown x) might be the root, or at least a symptom of the problem, which was upsetting both public and domestic affairs. The novel is a drama between opposing dogmas: progressive Feminism versus conservative Chauvinism, ultimately, between the forces of progress and reaction. The analysis of the ideological conflict between these two extremes is “dramatically focused in a conflict among characters who, James said, were evolved from his ‘moral consciousness’” (McMurray 339). The notebook-entry reveals that the novel represents James’s response to a contemporary phenomenon: it seeks to investigate the situatedness of individuals in a historical context. James's main purpose was to trace the effects of a confused system of morals in the relations between men and women and he chose to exemplify that idea by portraying a group of people in whom the essence of love had become distorted or vulgarized. The conservative James assumed that the epitome of the American problem lied in the decline of what was generally considered traditional ideals surrounding gender, which he evaluated as a potential threat to the equilibrium of forces that had previously regulated society.

The Clerk's Tale

Author : Thomas Augst
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226032205
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis The Clerk's Tale by : Thomas Augst

Download or read book The Clerk's Tale written by Thomas Augst and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-11-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it? Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.

Levinas and Nineteenth-century Literature

Author : Donald R. Wehrs
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 0874130573
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (741 download)

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Book Synopsis Levinas and Nineteenth-century Literature by : Donald R. Wehrs

Download or read book Levinas and Nineteenth-century Literature written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature presents nine essays that reread major British, American, and European nineteenth-century literary texts in light of the post-deconstruction ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The first section pursues in essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Baudelaire connections between Levinas's radical rethinking of subjectivity and Romantic generic, aesthetic, and conceptual innovation. The second section explores how Levinas's analysis of totalizing thought may illuminate how Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Douglass, Susan Warner, and Melville grapple with American experience and culture. The third section considers the relevance of Levinas's work for reassessments of the realist novel through essays on Austen, Dickens, and George Eliot. Essay authors are A.C. Goodson, David P. Haney, E.S. Burt, Alain Paul Toumayan, N.S. Boone, Lorna Wood, Donald R. Wehrs, Melvyn New, and Rachel Hollander. Donald R. Wehrs is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University. David P. Haney is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Dreams in Exile

Author : George E. McCarthy
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143842597X
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Dreams in Exile by : George E. McCarthy

Download or read book Dreams in Exile written by George E. McCarthy and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the influence of Aristotle and Kant on the nineteenth-century social theory of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

Manliness and Morality

Author : J. A. Mangan
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719023675
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (236 download)

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Book Synopsis Manliness and Morality by : J. A. Mangan

Download or read book Manliness and Morality written by J. A. Mangan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Good Form

Author : Jesse Rosenthal
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691196648
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis Good Form by : Jesse Rosenthal

Download or read book Good Form written by Jesse Rosenthal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion "feels right"? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? Good Form argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, Jesse Rosenthal shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre’s formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period’s least attractive and interesting qualities. But Good Form argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, Rosenthal shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. Good Form helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America

Author : Wayne E. Fuller
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252091353
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America by : Wayne E. Fuller

Download or read book Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America written by Wayne E. Fuller and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America explores the evolution of postal innovations that sparked a communication revolution in nineteenth-century America. Wayne E. Fuller examines how evangelical Protestants, the nation’s dominant religious group, struggled against those transformations in American society that they believed threatened to paganize the Christian nation they were determined to save. Drawing on House and Senate documents, postmasters general reports, and the Congressional Record, as well as sermons, speeches, and articles from numerous religious and secular periodicals, Fuller illuminates the problems the changed postal system posed for evangelicals, from Sunday mail delivery and Sunday newspapers to an avalanche of unseemly material brought into American homes via improved mail service and reduced postage prices. Along the way, Fuller offers new perspectives on the church and state controversy in the United States as well as on publishing, politics, birth control, the lottery, censorship, Congress’s postal power, and the waning of evangelical Protestant influence.