Kategoria BISAC: History >> Modern - 19th Century

Why did the Victorians collect with such a vengeance and exhibit in museums? Focusing on this key nineteenth-century enterprise, Barbara J. Black illuminates British culture of the period by examining the cultural power that this collecting and exhibiting possessed. Through its museums, she argues, Victorian London constructed itself as a world city.

Using the tools of cultural criticism, social history, and literary analysis, Black roots Victorian museum culture in key political events and cultural forces: British imperialism, exploration, and tourism; advances in science and...

From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic or humanistic -culture.- Joseph Bizup argues that early Victorian advocates of industry sought to resist the power inherent in this opposition by portraying automatic manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. He traces the contours of this new proindustrial rhetoric as it coalesced in two mutually reinforcing discourses: the contentious debate over the factory system and its social consequences that raged throughout the 1830s and 1840s,...

A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three -pearls- of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe.

Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the...

At the turn of the century, a spate of sensational trials kept French and English readers spellbound and ignited bitter tugs of war over marriage and divorce laws, women's rights, temperance, gay prostitution, and lesbian literature.

The chapters in Disorder in the Court each focus on a specific high-profile trial, and the public debates surrounding it, in order to address the role of the state in regulating sexual morality. The authors draw on police archives, records of coroners' inquests, magistrates' courts, and news coverage to bring to life social conflicts sparked by...

What is the difference between public and private feeling, and how far can we deduce past feelings from the words that have been left us? Why do child deaths figure so often and so prominently in the literature of the nineteenth century, and how was the theme of the death of a child used to elicit such poignant responses in the readers of that era? In this fascinating new book, Laurence Lerner vividly contrasts the contempt with which twentieth- century criticism so often dismisses such works as mere sentimentality with the enthusiasm and tears of nineteenth-century...