Search results
This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.
polarizing worldview, melodramas signify goodness in the suffering of victims, and signify evil in the cruelty of antagonists. … [I]ndividual characters are often the metonymic substitute for economic or social classes. (Anker, 2012: 136) The clash between Diana and Connie as the ‘metonymic substitutes’ for, respectively, the landed aristocracy and the working classes depicts not only the imbalance of power but also the left-wing and melodramatic stereotypes of the aristocracy as ‘bad’ and the working-class as ‘good’. Diana is not simply the villainous aristocrat flexing
The history of class struggle ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ 26 These words, surely the most famous about social class, open The Communist Manifesto (1848), the most influential work on class and class struggle in history. 27 The Manifesto has shaped how people have imagined class, both those who have accepted its broad-brush outline of history, as well as those hostile to its analysis, and
, foreigners – who must be dispatched to restored order; they can never assimilate. That social class shift in the werewolf persona, from gentleman victim to low-status monster, has continued in many popular media depictions of the creature ever since The Wolf Man . This chapter will explore this lesser position of the werewolf by first briefly examining that seminal film. Then, in an effort to contextualise the personification of the werewolf as la bête rather than a beauty, I draw briefly on texts from the seventeenth century through the Victorian
-overlooked archival material can reveal intersections between children's culture and history. This game is a convenient single artefact that expresses how children's everyday experiences of juxtaposed pasts were made relevant to their present. As an expensive commodity, it only offers one perspective: the elite home schoolroom of early nineteenth-century Britain. Yet, as the chapters in this volume reveal, multiple pasts were often experienced simultaneously in different ways and through different media, by boys and girls across the social classes and throughout the long
signify social standing. As Vanessa Smith states, Edward Christian ‘sees a natural aristocracy as uniting Christian with the Tahitian noble savage’ ( 2010 : 260). This naturalised connection becomes specular and indelible through the cultural practice of tattooing. An implicit acceptance of class divisions partially structured the form of primitivism that led many members of the Bounty to be tattooed, as well as the different designs they received. Two types of primitivist identification based on social class can be discerned in the tattooing
ambition, Antony’s glib manipulations – is indicated not only by the universal admiration for Brutus (from conspirators, from his wife and servants, from military colleagues and opponents) but also by the respect he shows to others of every social class, notably in the tender regard for his servant Lucius and for the soldier who assists Brutus in his suicide
his friend Paul Ree, tracing an arc from the ‘Darwinian beast’ to ‘the most modern and modest morality-tenderling, who “no longer bites”’. 5 For Shaw, who had reviewed A Genealogy in 1899, the English too had failed to fully engage with the pressing questions about mankind and morality that preoccupied the fin de siècle, so concerned were they with profit-making, social class, and late
This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants’ Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. It demonstrates how literary texts are determined by class relations and how they represent the interaction of classes in profound and apparently trivial ways. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial Revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialization; servitude; the relationship between agrarian and urban society; rebellion; gender relations; and colonization. After outlining the history of class relations in England and, after the union of 1707, Scotland, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Taylor, Robert Herrick, Aphra Behn, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, Daniel Defoe, Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, William Blake and William Wordsworth. The book concludes with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s An Address to the Irish People (1812), pointing to the need to explore class relations in the context of the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the British Empire, which a future work will analyse.
Pasts at play examines nineteenth-century children as active consumers of a variety of British pasts, from the biblical and classical to the medieval and early modern. This interdisciplinary collection bridges different disciplinary approaches to chart shifting markets for historical education between 1750 and 1914: a critical period in the development of children's culture, as children became target consumers for publishers. Boys and girls across the social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously for the purpose of amusement and instruction.
Play provides a dynamic lens through which to explore children’s interaction with the past as a didactic vehicle. Encompassing the past as both subject and site for production and consumption of earlier pasts (historical, mythical or imagined), each contributor reconstructs children’s encounters with different media to uncover the cultural work of individual pasts and exposes the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.
These ten essays argue that only through exploring the variety of media and different pasts marketed to children can we fully understand the scope of children’s interactions with the past. Sources, from games to guidebooks and puzzles to pageants, represent the range of visual, performative, material and textual cultures analysed here to develop fresh methodologies and new perspectives on children’s culture and the uses of the past.
Bringing together scholars from across a range of disciplines, including Classics, English and History, this volume is for researchers and students interested in the afterlives of the past, the history of education, and child consumerism and interaction.