Jovial Bigotry

This book revisits the debate over manners and morals that raged in France, Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. It was in essence a debate about gender and sexuality, and one of the foremost figures in the transnational discussions was the French writer and lecturer Paul Blouet, alias Max O’Rell (1847–1903). Although largely forgotten today, O’Rell deserves remembrance as a major phenomenon of the fin-de-siècle publishing and entertainment world. A Frenchman living in England but catering primarily to the American market, he disseminated national and gender stereotypes in an unprecedented way. Admired for the wit deployed in his lectures and his many best-selling books, he is a colorful exemplar of the many bourgeois commentators, male and female; most of them with mainstream political, social and cultural views, who engaged in these discussions, producing dense webs of assertion and opinion across countries and even continents. The elegant French salonnière, the independent but trustworthy English girl, the bitter American spinster activist meddling in public affairs: these are just a few examples of the many caricatural representations of women thrust into the debate. Max O’Rell and his fellow observers commented on women’s position in family and society, their partnership in the couple, their education, their sexual fulfilment, their right to paid work, aspects of social etiquette, feminism, domestic abuse, adultery and prostitution. There were frequent disagreements and sometimes hostile exchanges, but this analysis of the debate reveals a fundamentally common outlook among its participants: an agreement on patriarchy as the foundation of bourgeois society, and on the necessity to confine women in carefully stereotyped roles.

Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often – surprisingly and paradoxically – represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the café-concert and its tradition of ‘Englishing up’ with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.

This definitive biography depicts one Victorian woman’s struggle to stay afloat in a rising tide of prurient scandalmongering and snobbery. Could it be that this woman’s character and circumstances informed Oscar Wilde’s social comedies? She was the daughter of a leading Conservative Oxford don, vilified as an arrogant fortune-hunter. Her liaison dangereuse with a Duke resulted in ostracism by Queen Victoria’s cronies, as well as protracted, widely publicised legal disputes with his family. One battle put her in Holloway Gaol for six weeks. Her supporters, over time, included Disraeli, the Khedival family of Egypt, the de Lesseps, and Sir Albert Kaye Rollit (a promoter of women’s suffrage, later her third husband). Her life and that of her family drew in British and European colonialism, and even Reilly, the “Ace of Spies”. Various previously untapped letters, diaries and journals allow the reader to navigate through the sensationalist fog of the primarily Liberal press of her time. The book will appeal to anyone interested in Victorian and journalism history, and gender and celebrity studies.

The case study has proved of enduring interest to all Western societies, particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity and the sexed self. This volume interrogates how case studies have been used by doctors, lawyers, psychoanalysts, and writers to communicate their findings both within the specialist circles of their academic disciplines, and beyond, to wider publics. At the same time, it questions how case studies have been taken up by a range of audiences to refute and dispute academic knowledge. As such, this book engages with case studies as sites of interdisciplinary negotiation, transnational exchange and influence, exploring the effects of forces such as war, migration, and internationalization. Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge challenges the limits of disciplinary-based research in the humanities. The cases examined serve as a means of passage between disciplines, genres, and publics, from law to psychoanalysis, and from auto/biography to modernist fiction. Its chapters scrutinize the case study in order to sharpen understanding of the genre’s dynamic role in the construction and dissemination of knowledge within and across disciplinary, temporal, and national boundaries. In doing so, they position the case at the center of cultural and social understandings of the emergence of modern subjectivities.

A modern-day Sherlock Holmes, Bernie Quist operates as a consultant detective from Baker Avenue in York. His assistant is Watson, although this Watson is a streetwise youth from the Grimpen housing estate and he's definitely no doctor. The mismatched duo take on bizarre cases which invariably lead into the realms of the supernatural, a shadowy world that, thanks to his dark secret, Quist is all too familiar with. The north of England has a new political group headed by Dominic Churchill. The White Rose Party campaign for Yorkshire independence, fairer wages and pensions, and the adoption of Yorkshire Pudding as Britain’s national dish. Unfortunately, white is the appropriate word, for their amiable façade conceals a far right organisation with a sinister racist agenda. Watson’s Jewish girlfriend has been attacked by Churchill’s thugs and Quist is determined to expose these white supremacists and end their rise to power. The detective soon realises that Churchill and his people have been targeted by someone else, a highly dangerous individual with a terrifying supernatural weapon. This man also plans to end White Rose, but his idea of ending is a touch more homicidal and gruesome. A dark and very peculiar game is afoot…

After the shock decision to leave the EU in 2016, what can we learn about our divided and increasingly unequal society and the need to listen to each other? This engaging and accessible book addresses the causes and implications of Brexit, exploring this moral anger against political elites and people feeling estranged from a political process and economic system that no longer expressed their will. Seidler argues that we need new political imaginations across class, race, religion, gender and sexuality to engage in issues about the scale and acceleration of urban change and the time people need to adjust to new realities. He suggests we need to listen to people's concerns not only about the impact of immigration and globalisation on their lives but also about the injustice of a capitalist economy that makes them pay through austerity and cuts in social welfare for a financial crisis they were not responsible for. He imagines alternative futures that will allow different generations to still appreciate themselves as Europeans with a future in Europe.