Picturing Reform In Victorian Britain

"How did Victorians, as creators and viewers of images, visualize the politics of franchise reform? This study of Victorian art and parliamentary politics, specifically in the 1840s and 1860s, answers that question by viewing the First and Second Reform Acts from the perspectives offered by Ruskin's political theories of art and Bagehot's visual theory of politics. Combining subjects and approaches characteristic of art history, political history, literary criticism and cultural critique, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain treats both paintings and wood engravings, particularly those published in Punch and the Illustrated London News. Carlisle analyzes unlikely pairings - a novel by Trollope and a painting by Hayter, an engraving after Leech and a high-society portrait by Landseer - to argue that such conjunctions marked both everyday life in Victorian Britain and the nature of its visual politics as it was manifested in the myriad heterogeneous and often incongruous images of illustrated journalism"--

An innovative exploration of Victorian art and politics that examines how paintings and newspaper illustrations visualized franchise reform.

The two centuries after 1800 witnessed a series of sweeping changes in the way in which Britain was governed, the duties of the state, and its role in the wider world. Powerful processes - from the development of democracy, the changing nature of the social contract, war, and economic dislocation - have challenged, and at times threatened to overwhelm, both governors and governed. Such shifts have also presented challenges to the historians who have researched and written about Britain's past politics. This Handbook shows the ways in which political historians have responded to these challenges, providing a snapshot of a field which has long been at the forefront of conceptual and methodological innovation within historical studies. It comprises thirty-three thematic essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field. Collectively, these essays assess and rethink the nature of modern British political history itself and suggest avenues and questions for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History thus provides a unique resource for those who wish to understand Britain's political past and a thought-provoking 'long view' for those interested in current political challenges.

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

6.3 An inquiry into the state of girls' fashionable schools -- 6.4 The University of London and middle-class education -- 6.5 Universities of England - Oxford -- 6.6 Queen's College, London -- 6.7 Technical education a national want -- 7 Leisure and the Arts -- 7.1 Sundays and festivals -- 7.2 Pictures and picture-criticism -- 7.3 A petition to novel-writers -- 7.4 A word about our theatres -- 7.5 The present state of photography -- 7.6 A sportsman's apology -- Further Reading -- Index

Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.

This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.