Tag: Victorian

Free Download Living in Early Victorian London by Michael Alpert
English | June 30th, 2023 | ISBN: 1399060848 | 224 pages | True EPUB | 13.81 MB
London in the 1840s was sprawling and smoke-filled, a city of extreme wealth and abject poverty. Some streets were elegant with brilliantly gas-lit shop windows full of expensive items, while others were narrow, fetid, muddy, and in many cases foul with refuse and human filth. Railways, stations and sidings were devouring whole districts and creating acres of slums or ‘rookeries’ into which the poor of the city were jammed and where crime, disease and prostitution were rife.

Free Download Christopher Hibbert, "Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister Ed 2"
English | ISBN: 1403972702 | 2006 | 432 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
To Thomas Carlyle he was "not worth his weight in cold bacon," but, to Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli was "the kindest Minister" she had ever had and a "dear and devoted friend." In this masterly biography by England’s "outstanding popular historian" (A.N. Wilson), Christopher Hibbert reveals the personal life of one of the most fascinating men of the nineteenth century and England’s most eccentric Prime Minister. A superb speaker, writer, and wit, Disraeli did not intend to be a politician. Born into a family of Jewish merchants, Disraeli was a conspicuous dandy, constantly in debt, and enjoyed many scandalous affairs until, in 1839, he married an eccentric widow twelve years older than him. As an antidote to his grief at his wife’s death in 1872, he threw himself into politics becoming Prime Minister for the second time in 1874, much to the Queen’s delight.

Free Download Rosie Miles, "Victorian Poetry in Context "
English | ISBN: 0826430554 | 2013 | 208 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Victorian Poetry in Context offers a lively and accessible introduction to the diverse range of poetry written in the Victorian period. Considering such issues as reform and protest, gender, science and belief this book sets out the social and cultural contexts for the poetry of a fast-changing era. Sections on Victorian poetics, form and Victorian voices introduce the key literary contexts of poetry’s production, and poetic innovations of the period such as the dramatic monologue are highlighted . At the heart of the book is a focus on the importance of attentive close reading, with original readings offered of well-known texts alongside those that have recently received renewed attention within scholarship. The book also offers an overview of critical approaches to several key texts and discussion of how Victorian poetry has remained influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Victorian poetry.

Free Download Irmtraud Huber, "Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry Ed 116"
English | ISBN: 1399511815 | 2023 | 296 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry explores the question of poetry’s relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent – as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.

Free Download Linda Hughes, "Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity "
English | ISBN: 1316512843 | 2022 | 285 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers’ advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, ‘other’ Germany into English letters.

Free Download Amy R. Wong, "Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk"
English | ISBN: 1503635171 | 2023 | 240 pages | PDF | 1411 KB
In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech’s ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech-such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency-into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain’s twin crises of territorialization-of empire and of new media-spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech’s tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech’s colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship.

Free Download Jill Rappoport, "Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction"
English | ISBN: 0192867261 | 2023 | 240 pages | PDF | 4 MB
Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women’s changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels.

Free Download Deborah Lutz, "Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture "
English | ISBN: 1107077443 | 2015 | 260 pages | PDF | 5 MB
Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life – not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.

Free Download Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader By Hannah Field
2019 | 248 Pages | ISBN: 1517901766 | PDF | 38 MB
A beautifully illustrated exploration of how Victorian novelty picture books reshape the ways children read and interact with texts The Victorian era saw an explosion of novelty picture books with flaps to lift and tabs to pull, pages that could fold out, pop-up scenes, and even mechanical toys mounted on pages. Analyzing books for young children published between 1835 and 1914, Playing with the Book studies how these elaborately designed works raise questions not just about what books should look like but also about what reading is, particularly in relation to children’s literature and child readers.Novelty books promised (or threatened) to make reading a physical as well as intellectual activity, requiring the child to pull a tab or lift a flap to continue the story. These books changed the relationship between pictures, words, and format in both productive and troubling ways. Hannah Field considers these aspects of children’s reading through case studies of different formats of novelty and movable books and intensive examination of editions that have survived from the nineteenth century. She discovers that children ripped, tore, and colored in their novelty books-despite these books’ explicit instructions against such behaviors.Richly illustrated with images of these ingenious constructions, Playing with the Book argues that novelty books construct a process of reading that involves touch as well as sight, thus reconfiguring our understanding of the phenomenology of reading.

Free Download Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 (Audiobook)
English | March 23, 2007 | ASIN: B000OPPSIK | MP3@32 kbps | 13h 7m | 175.07 MB
Author: Dominic Green
Narrator: Stephen Hoye