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"English literature 19th century History and criticism."
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Taming Cannibals
InTaming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the \"civilizing mission\" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with \"lesser\" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior-an even \"fitter\" or \"higher\" race or species.
Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts-includingRobinson Crusoeby Daniel Defoe,Fiji and the Fijiansby Thomas Williams,Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmaniansby James Bonwick,The Descent of Manby Charles Darwin,Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad,Culture and Anarchyby Matthew Arnold,Sheby H. Rider Haggard, andThe War of the Worldsby H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and richTaming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.
eBook
Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form
During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice drawing persistent attention to what they called \"fictitious capital.\" In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, being replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of \"psychic economy.\" In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century's most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature's unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.
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Victorian Literature
How were the genres of literature changed by new methods of serialization and publishing? How did a widespread culture of performance emerge in the period to shape as well as to be shaped by the novel and poetry? David Amigoni draws on the most recent critical approaches to the novel, Victorian melodrama and poetry to answer these and other questions. The work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle and Mathew Arnold are explored in relation to ideas about fiction, journalism, drama, poetry, the New Woman, gothic, horror and the Victorian sage.
Key Features
Detailed readings of key texts provide models of how to read criticallyDemonstrates the interaction between genres to help think through modes of artistic experimentation and innovation in the periodExamines Neo-Victorian fiction, a popular genre todayStudent resources include electronic and reference sources, further reading and an extensive glossary of key critical terms and historical issues
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Gender, Technology and the New Woman
This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.
eBook
Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies
Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism's concern with issues of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries.
Key Features
Explains how key theoretical concerns of postcolonial studies - its analyses of imaginary geography, the construction of otherness or difference, and cultural hybridity - have dramatically changed our understanding of Romantic literatureProvides accessible yet sophisticated in-depth analyses of selected texts, in a range of genres, whose interpretation is illuminated by postcolonial criticismIncludes a bibliographical essay along with up-to-date bibliography of criticism, editions of primary works, and selected historical materials
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