Victorian Sensation

Author : James A. Secord
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022615825X
Total Pages : 645 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Sensation written by James A. Secord and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09-20 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began. In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print. Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted. Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society

Author : Michael Diamond
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 184331150X
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Sensation written by Michael Diamond and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating look at the origins of our own tabloid culture in the salacious and titillating media of the Victorian era.

Author : Michael Diamond
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 0857287389
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Sensation written by Michael Diamond and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2004-10-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.

Author : D. Wynne
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 023059672X
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine written by D. Wynne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-07-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian sensation novels, with their compulsive plots of crime, transgression and mystery, were bestsellers. Deborah Wynne analyses the fascinating relationships between sensation novels and the magazines in which they were serialized. Drawing upon the work of Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and Charles Reade, and such popular family journals as All The Year Round, The Cornhill, and Once a Week , the author highlights how novels and magazines worked together to engage in the major cultural and social debates of the period.

Author : Kimberly Harrison
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814210317
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Sensations written by Kimberly Harrison and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers." "Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts' complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews the critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Marilyn Brock
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786454407
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Wollstonecraft to Stoker written by Marilyn Brock and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Bronte. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.

Author : Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317093917
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels written by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstruct and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

Author : David Sweeney Coombs
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813943434
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science written by David Sweeney Coombs and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

Author : Ann Cvetkovich
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780813518565
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mixed Feelings written by Ann Cvetkovich and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that affect has a history, Ann Cvetkovich challenges both nineteenth- and twentieth-century claims that the expression of feeling is naturally or intrinsically liberating or reactionary. The central focus of Mixed Feelings is the Victorian sensation novel, the fad genre of the 1860s, whose controversial popularity marks an important moment in the history of mass culture. Drawing on Marxist, feminist, and Foucauldian cultural theory, Cvetkovich investigates the sensation novel's power to produce emotional responses, its representation of social problems as affective ones, and the difficulties involved in assessing the genre as either reactionary or subversive. She is particularly concerned with the relation of gender and affect since many of the sensation novels were written by and for women, and women. By examining the powerful conjunction of ideologies of affect, gender, and mass culture, Cvetkovich reveals the powerful political effects of affective expression and sensational representations.

Author : Jessica Cox
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137471727
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Sensation Fiction written by Jessica Cox and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.