Disreputable Pleasures

This irreverent and revisionist collection challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach. It explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such values as manliness, muscularity and machismo, or sensuality, virility and hedonism. It sheds light on the ways in which the public rhetoric of Victorian respectability could be rendered problematic by the practical pursuit of private pleasure. It shows that Victorian leisure was a much more contested cul.

In any given society, most behaviors are accorded a socially significant status as either acceptable or not, reputable or disreputable. A basic proposition of modern sociology is that deviance varies by social location. This book discusses the causes and consequences of disrepute in Canada. The argument is that there are both similarities and differences between the Canadian and American situations and this pattern is explored with the hope of developing a sociology of deviance that is more sensitive to the socially significant and national boundaries.

Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.

Resource added for the Psychology (includes Sociology) 108091 courses.

Advances a new sociology of crime and disrepute that focuses on the criminal costs of social inequality. Connects the diversion of capital away from distressed communities in the U.S. to increased violence and lack of social mobility for disadvantaged groups, which result in the development of "deviance service centers" and "ethnic vice industries." Shows the important link between "crime in the streets" and "crime in the suites" and the differences between the two in eluding punishment.

Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Volume four of a ten volume set which provides full and detailed coverage of all aspects of philosophy, including information on how philosophy is practiced in different countries, who the most influential philosophers were, and what the basic concepts are.