Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume.
Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon.
Victorian culture was dominated by an ever expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers, and periodicals, was matched by the corresponding development of the first mass reading public. Victorian Print Media: A Reader consists of edited extracts from nineteenth-century sources which discuss all aspects of the production and circulation of print media. The extracts are organized into thematically arranged sections such as authorship and journalism, reading spaces, and the influence of print.
Literary Remains - Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England
Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO's Six Feet Under, quipped, "Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything." So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker.
Men of Blood - Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England
An examination of the treatment of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England. During Victoria's reign the criminal law came to punish such violence more systematically and heavily, while propagating a new, more pacific ideal of manliness. Yet this apparently progressive legal development called forth strong resistance, not only from violent men themselves but, from others who drew upon discourses of democracy, humanitarianism and patriarchy to establish sympathy with 'men of blood'.
