Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain - Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew
How and why should we study Victorian Britain? The answer to this question used to be quite straightforward. It was the Victorian contribution to modern politics which stood out above all else. Today we are not so sure. This book suggest that politics are still central, but must be more broadly construed, as a pervasive part of Victorian culture as a whole.
In the nineteenth century, epic poetry in the Homeric style was widely seen as an ancient and anachronistic genre, yet Victorian authors worked to recreate it for the modern world. Simon Dentith explores the relationship between epic and the evolution of Britain's national identity in the nineteenth century up to the apparent demise of all notions of heroic warfare in the catastrophe of the First World War. Paradoxically, writers found equivalents of the societies which produced Homeric or Northern epics not in Europe, but on the margins of empire and among its subject peoples.
"A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain" presents 33 essays by expert scholars on all the major aspects of the political, social, economic, and cultural history of Britain during the late Georgian and Victorian eras. It makes sense of the fascinating new perspectives on this era that have been generated in recent years while not losing sight of broader, more enduring themes.
This is the first fully-documented history of Ireland and the Irish from Saint Patrick to the Vikings. Other books cover either a longer period (up to the Anglo-Norman conquests) or do not indicate in detail the evidence on which they are based. The book opens with the Irish raids and settlements in Britain, and the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, and ends as Viking attacks on Ireland accelerated in the second quarter of the ninth century.
The Idea of Britain and the Origins of Scottish Independence: From the Picts to Alexander III
This book challenges the belief that the Scots were an ancient nation whose British identity only emerged in the early modern era. In fact, the idea of Scotland as an independent kingdom was older than the age of Wallace and Bruce. Dauvit Broun radically reassesses a range of fundamental issues: the fate of Pictish identity and the origins of Alba, the status of Scottish kingship vis-A-vis England, the papacy's recognition of the independence of the Scottish Church, and the idea of Scottish freedom.
