Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry explores the question of poetry’s relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent – as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.
An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain
- Fresh readings of canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
- Diverse primary sources analysing the presence of the Arabian Nights in distinct areas of cultural production: constructions of childhood, archaeological and geological science, theatrical display, and exhibitions
Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape?
Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found
Reads Kipling’s fiction through the lens of French feminism to reinstate the abjected maternal feminine in his art
This study provides an entirely new reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. It examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures. In doing so, it peels back the layers of masculine bravado that continues to characterize Kipling’s fiction to reveal a valorized ‘feminine’ space. From readings of the 1888 story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' through The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co., Kim, The Day's Work, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, Lizzy Welby demonstrates that Kipling created ways of rediscovering a symbolised feminine landscape as a restorative space, which was part of his 'psychic mapping'.
Key Features:
- Demonstrates a steady development through Kipling’s long and extensive writing career
- Provides insights into the man and his art as well as providing a new way of reading Kipling
- References a considerable range of scholarly and biographical work on Kipling, historical and cultural studies of nineteenth century India
- Offers close reading of passages from Kipling’s fiction, showing how a feminised landscape is violated by (masculine) technological developments
Examines cultural representations of women’s experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women’s trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists and colonists.
In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman’s impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, but also battlefields of gender, class and imperial ideology.
Key features:
- The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context
- Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and illustrations
- Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary
- Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
- Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study
This phenomenological exploration of the streets of Dickens's London opens up new perspectives on the city and the writer.Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as an inspiration, Dickens's London offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - Dickens's novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from Dickens's interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens's London presents in twenty-six episodes (from Banking and Breakfast via the Insolvent Court, Melancholy and Poverty, to Todgers and Time, Voice and Waking) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both.Key Features* Major reassessment of Dickens's writing on the city * Dual focus on methodology and the historicity of Dickensian urban consciousness* Philosophical reflections on urban tropologies through key passages from Dickens's texts recreate the experience of Victorian London * Inventive structure offers the reader an experience of the disordered multiplicity of London* Illustrated with 19 maps and photographs
