Victorian London Slums Seven Dials

The Seven Dials refers to the layout of the cobbled streets in this London 'village,' which includes Monmouth Street, Earlham Street and Mercer Street. The seven streets radiate out from the central sundial Looking closely you'll see the dial only has only six faces; this is due to an earlier urban planning drawn up by Thomas Neale in the 17th century who devised the characteristic seven dials street layout to maximize the number of houses that could be built on the site so maximizing his profit.

A portrait of London and its people - from the richest to the poorest - when it was the world's greatest and most quickly expanding city.

The British Jesus focuses on the Jesus of the religious culture dominant in Britain from the 1850s through the 1950s, the popular Christian culture shared by not only church, kirk, and chapel goers, but also the growing numbers of Britons who rarely or only episodically entered a house of worship. An essay in intellectual as well as cultural history, this book illumines the interplay between and among British New Testament scholarship, institutional Christianity, and the wider Protestant culture. The scholars who mapped and led the uniquely British quest for the historical Jesus in the first half of the twentieth century were active participants in efforts to replace the popular image of “Jesus in a white nightie” with a stronger figure, and so, they hoped, to preserve Britain’s Christian identity. They failed. By exploring that failure, and more broadly, by examining the relations and exchanges between popular, artistic, and scholarly portrayals of Jesus, this book highlights the continuity and the conservatism of Britain’s popular Christianity through a century of religious and cultural transformation. Exploring depictions of Jesus from over more than one hundred years, this book is a crucial resource for scholars of British Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, (re-)configures how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

A discussion of the Victorians and their literature. It sets out the political, social and economic framework of the period, and then goes on to study the various influences on the novel, addresses the forms and styles of poetry and, finally, provides an overview of Victorian drama. Each chapter features a further reading list and there is a comparative time-line, a biographical glossary and a list of websites. The volume is part of a series which sets writers and literary works of different types and periods in their historical, social and cultural context and provides an introduction to various genres.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

Tracing representations of re-imagined Victorian families in literature, film and television, and social discourse, this collection, the second volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, analyses the historical trajectory of persistent but increasingly contested cultural myths that coalesce around the heterosexual couple and nuclear family as the supposed ‘normative’ foundation of communities and nations, past and present. It sheds new light on the significance of families as a source of fluctuating cultural capital, deployed in diverse arenas from political debates, social policy and identity politics to equal rights activism, and analyses how residual as well as emergent ideologies of family are mediated and critiqued by contemporary arts and popular culture. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in contemporary literature and film studies, cultural studies and the history of the family. Situating the nineteenth-century family both as a site of debilitating trauma and the means of ethical resistance against multivalent forms of oppression, neo-Victorian texts display a fascinating proliferation of alternative family models, albeit overshadowed by the apparent recalcitrance of familial ideologies to the same historical changes neo-Victorianism reflects and seeks to promote within the cultural imaginary.