Reading Victorian Deafness
By Jennifer Esmail
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Disability Studies · History | Europe | Great Britain | Victorian Era · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
A Necessary Luxury
Tea in Victorian England
By Julie E. Fromer
In A Necessary Luxury Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability.
Social History · British History · Popular Culture · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era
Unconquerable Spirit
George Stow’s History Painting of the San
By Pippa Skotnes
George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts—poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer, and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him.Un
African History · Southern Africa · South Africa · 19th century · Victorian Era · Khoisan · Anthropology · Art · History · African Studies · Africa
The Demon and the Damozel
Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
By Suzanne Waldman
Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts.Suzanne
Victorian Studies · Art · Poetry · Christina Rossetti · Victorian Era · 19th century
Heretical Hellenism
Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
By Shanyn Fiske
Heretical Hellenism examines sources such as theater history and popular journals to uncover the ways women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy and challenged traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · 19th century · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
Claim to the Country
The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd
By Pippa Skotnes
In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San—or Bushmen—were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars.
Anthropology · Southern Africa · South Africa · 19th century · Victorian Era · Khoisan · History · African Studies · African History · Art · Africa
Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842–1907
By Susan Shoenbauer Thurin
Three men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842–1907. Their range of perspectives, their acquaintance with one another and their similar scope of travel to Hong Kong, the treaty ports, and Sichuan lend intensity to their picture of China and the Western presence there.What
British Literature · China · Literature · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era
The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society’s attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.The
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies · Christina Rossetti · Victorian Era
Victorian Conventions
By John Robert Reed
“A large encyclopedic study of fifteen conventions of Victorian fiction—including women, marriage, coincidence, the orphan, memory, the occult.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · United Kingdom · Literature · Victorian Era
