Germaine de Stael, George Sand and the Victorian Woman Artist
By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury and Mrs Humphrey Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as a god and hero, the women of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Stael and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Staels "Corinne" and Sand's "Consuelo" combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil's Sibyl and Dante's Beatrice.
Disreputable Pleasures - Less Virtuous Victorians at Play
Many historians have claimed that respectability was the sharpest line of social division in Victorian society, even that the line between the 'respectable' and 'unrespectable' was more significant than between rich and poor. This irreverent and revisionist collection argues that they have over-polarised Victorian attitudes and challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach.
A Sport Loving Society - Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play
In a time of unprecedented political and economic transformation, the middle classes of Victorian and Edwardian England became principal players in a new social order. Nowhere did their culture, values and identity gain clearer expression than in their sports, and their influence is still felt in the way we organise, play and think of sport today.
Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels - Creating a Woman's Space
Spatial dynamics and imagery surface as distinctive and insightful elements for investigating female figures in Victorian art and literature. This book explores the concept that space can be a productive and creative realm, rather than merely an empty or confining category, for personal development. Through discussing representative Victorian paintings of the mid- to late-1800s, as well as novels by women authors, Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels illustrates the ways visual and literary genres utilize space. This book sharpens our view of nineteenth-century women's perspectives on themselves, and recognizes connections between the visual and literary arts.
The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century.
