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"Middle class England London."
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Where Are You From?
Dhooleka S. Raj explores the complexities of ethnic minority cultural change in this incisive examination of first- and second-generation middle-class South Asian families living in London. Challenging prevalent understandings of ethnicity that equate community, culture, and identity, Raj considers how transnational ethnic minorities are circumscribed by nostalgia for culture.Where Are You From?argues that the nostalgia for culture obscures the complexities of change in migrant minority lives and limits the ways the politics of diversity can be imagined by the nation. Based on ethnographic research with Indian migrants and their children, this book examines how categories of identity, culture, community, and nation are negotiated and often equated.
eBook
Keep the aspidistra flying
'Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.' Gordon Comstock decides to live in poverty rather than compromise with the 'money god'. Disgusted by society's materialism, he leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' is widely viewed as a key transitional text in Orwell's career.
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Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife: What She Did All Day
Through a detailed description of the life and activities of the middle-class married woman of London between 1875 and 1900, this study reveals how housewives unwittingly became engines for change as the new century neared. In marked contrast to the stereotypical depictions of Victorian women in literature and on television, Draznin reveals a woman seldom seen: the stay-at-home housewife whose activities were not much different than those of her counterparts today. By exploring her daily activities, how she cleaned her home, disciplined her children, managed her servants, stretched a limited budget, and began to indulge herself, one discovers the human dimension of women who lived more than a century ago. While most studies of this period consider values, aspirations, and attitudes, this book concentrates on actions, what these women did all day, to provide readers with a new perspective on Victorian life. Late-Victorian London was a surprisingly modern city with a public face of well-lit streets, an excellent underground railway system, and extended municipal services. In the home, gas stoves were replacing coal ranges and household appliances were becoming more common. Having both money to spend and a strong incentive to buy the new laborsaving devices, ready-to-wear clothing, and other manufactured products, the middle-class matron's resistance to change gave way to a rising consumer culture. Despite her nearly exclusive preoccupation with home and family, these urban women became agents for the modernization of Britain.
eBook
In the falling snow
Estranged from his entire family and accused of harassment by a colleague, social worker and race advocate Keith struggles with growing fears about the pointlessness of his work while tracing the events that have led to his present state.
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The Global City
This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.
eBook
Bourgeois consumption : food, space and identity in London and Paris, 1850-1914
\"Bourgeois Consumption looks at how the middle classes in late nineteenth-century London and Paris used food and dining as forms of social expression and identity. This engaging treatise about how class and gender informed people's eating habits focuses on the complex interactions between bodies, ritual and identity. Forgoing the traditional food history territory of recipes and ingredients in favor of how people ate in different circles, Bourgeois Consumption explores the role of real and imagined meals in shaping Victorian lives. The perception of the middle classes as rigid and upright, found in the extensive pages of their etiquette books, is contrasted with a more flexible and spontaneous bourgeoisie, gleaned from the pages of their own colorful memoirs, diaries and letters, leading us on a lively journey into eating spaces, mealtimes, manners, and social interactions between diners. Further, contrasting Paris with London reveals some of the ways each city shaped its inhabitants but, more surprisingly, throws up a range of similarities that suggest the middle classes were, in fact, a transnational class. Locations such as the private home, the restaurant, the club and the banquet, traversed by individuals moving between social groups and spaces, offer insights not only into how class informs, but how it is actually shaped by consumption. Rachel Rich's work will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the history of food, consumption and leisure, as well as to a broader audience curious about how the Victorian middle classes distinguished themselves through daily life and manners.\"--Publisher's website.
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Place-making and Place Maintenance: Performativity, Place and Belonging among the Middle Classes
This article introduces performativity and processes of place-making into discussions about middle-class residents' place attachments. It draws on interviews with middle-class residents in two different London neighbourhoods, Peckham (inner urban, socially mixed) and West Horsley and Effingham (commuter belt villages), to argue that (1) the practice of place is key to understanding middle-class claims to belonging; and (2) ways of 'doing' neighbourhood must be understood within the context of other circulating representations. While respondents in Peckham work with or against prevailing discourses about their neighbourhood as they perform place, in the commuter belt, residents strive to uphold the image of their village as the rural idyll, a classed and racialised vision. The contrast between the inner city and commuter belt reveals the different performative registers through which place is practised; while in Peckham middle-class residents invest in processes of place-making, respondents in the commuter belt engage instead in active processes of place maintenance.
Journal Article
British masculinity in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731 to 1815
\"Launched in 1731, the monthly Gentleman's Magazine was the dominant periodical of the eighteenth century, drawing its large readership from across the literate population of Great Britain and the English-speaking world. Its readers were highly responsive. By the 1740s their letters, poems and family announcements, especially obituaries, filled at least half its pages, sitting alongside articles by a circle that included Samuel Johnson. It was a Georgian social network as readers engaged in a continuous dialogue with each other, but not all these readers were as comfortably established as gentlemen as the title implied. This study traces how, from launch to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the magazine developed as a vehicle for the creation and national dissemination of a new middling-sort masculine gentlemanliness in a Britain that was increasingly commercial, fluid and open. It was an accessible gentlemanliness based on an ideology of merit through occupational success allied to personal probity. From the close of the Seven Year's War in 1763 the magazine used the merit of the self-made man to challenge the aristocratic ruling class. It was therefore a major contributor to the development of Victorian middle-class identity. Indeed, the meritorious self-made man remains one of the bulwarks of Conservative thought today\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.
eBook