Victorian Technology - Invention, Innovation and the Rise of the Machine
An enlightening history of 19th-century technology, focusing on the connections between invention and cultural values. In 1822, Charles Babbage unveiled his Difference Engine—a mechanical device made of thousands of hand-tooled parts that could calculate large numbers with unprecedented precision. In other words, it was the prototype of the computer—one of many Victorian-era innovations that foreshadowed the technologies that define our world.
Consuming Angels - Advertising and Victorian Women
Timid and retiring, the Victorian housewife was an "angel in the house," or so says the stereotype. But when this angel picked up a popular magazine--The Lady, for instance--she saw in its advertisements images of Grecian goddesses, women warriors, queens, actresses, adventurers. These arrestingly sexual and surprisingly powerful images are the subject of Consuming Angels, a major examination of how Victorian ads shaped social values. Stylishly written and featuring 73 reproductions, this book shows how ads used the hedonistic aspects of Victorian culture to sell their wares, glorified consumerism, and mythologized the middle-class life.
In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places.
Nationalism, Imperialism and Idendtity in Late Victorian Culture - Civil and Military Worlds
This book gives an account of the refashioning of ideas about national character in late Victorian culture, with a wide reference to literature and popular culture around the time of the Boer War, and a particular scrutiny of images of the soldier. In specific images, narratives and motifs, the book highlights dynamic tensions, between the external boundaries of empire and those of civil society, and between class antagonisms and national projections. Many new sources and materials are introduced to this field of study.
Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past
Examining works by writers including Michle Roberts, Michael Faber and A.S. Byatt, this collection highlights the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in neo-Victorian novels through the tropes of haunting and spectrality, parallelling a renewed interest in the impact of the supernatural and the occult on Victorian individuals.
