Work And The Nineteenth Century Press

Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. This volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.

The 2017 winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize Providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of scholarship on nineteenth-century British periodicals, this volume surveys the current state of research and offers researchers an in-depth examination of contemporary methodologies. The impact of digital media and archives on the field informs all discussions of the print archive. Contributors illustrate their arguments with examples and contextualize their topics within broader areas of study, while also reflecting on how the study of periodicals may evolve in the future. The Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century culture who are interested in issues of cultural formation, transformation, and transmission in a developing industrial and globalizing age, as well as those whose research focuses on the bibliographical and the micro case study. In addition to rendering a comprehensive review and critique of current research on nineteenth-century British periodicals, the Handbook suggests new avenues for research in the twenty-first century. "This volume's 30 chapters deal with practically every aspect of periodical research and with the specific topics and audiences the 19th-century periodical press addressed. It also covers matters such as digitization that did not exist or were in early development a generation ago. In addition to the essays, readers will find 50 illustrations, 54 pages of bibliography, and a chronology of the periodical press. This book gives seemingly endless insights into the ways periodicals and newspapers influenced and reflected 19th-century culture. It not only makes readers aware of problems involved in interpreting the history of the press but also offers suggestions for ways of untangling them and points the direction for future research. It will be a valuable resource for readers with interests in almost any aspect of 19th-century Britain. Summing Up: Highly recommended" - J. D. Vann, University of North Texas in CHOICE

Extending the limits of the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and its companion volume (and also award-winning) Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. The collection’s innovative focus on the nineteenth-century British press’s relationship to work illuminates an area whose effects are still evident today but which has been almost totally neglected hitherto. Offering bold new interpretative frameworks and provocative methodologies in media history and literary studies developed by an exciting group of new and established talent, this volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.

A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

Drawing on historical records of women’s varying experiences as litigants, accused criminals, or witnesses, this book offers critical insight into women’s legal status in nineteenth-century Canada. In an effort to recover the social and political conditions under which women lobbied, rebelled, and in some cases influenced change, Petticoats and Prejudice weaves together forgotten stories of achievement and defeat in the Canadian legal system. Expanding the concept of “heroism” beyond its traditional limitations, this text gives life to some of Canada’s lost heroines. Euphemia Rabbitt, who resisted an attempted rape, and Clara Brett Martin, who valiantly secured entry into the all-male legal profession, were admired by their contemporaries for their successful pursuits of justice. But Ellen Rogers, a prostitute who believed all women should be legally protected against sexual assault, and Nellie Armstrong, a battered wife and mother who sought child custody, were ostracized for their ideas and demands. Well aware of the limitations placed upon women advocating for reform in a patriarchal legal system, Constance Backhouse recreates vivid and textured snapshots of these and other women’s courageous struggles against gender discrimination and oppression. Employing social history to illuminate the reproductive, sexual, racial, and occupational inequalities that continue to shape women’s encounters with the law, Petticoats and Prejudice is an essential entry point into the gendered treatment of feminized bodies in Canadian legal institutions. This book was co-published with The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.

The power of the popular press presents all modern societies with difficulties. It is, however, a problem with a history: the hold of the press over public opinion was debated with urgency throughout the 19th century. This book looks at the ways in which individuals, pressure groups, political organisations and the state sought to understand the mass communications media of the 19th century, and use them to influence public opinion and effect moral and social reform. Aled Jones addresses the problem by using three approaches: first he considers the 19th century theories of the influence of communications media on patterns of social thought and behaviour; then he examines attitudes towards the press in both high and popular culture; finally he explores the social and intellectual world of the reader, the consumer both of the press as a commodity and of the hidden moral strategies that were built into it. The tensions between Victorian moral imperatives and the operation of the free commercial market raised issues of great public concern, such as whether the mass media should be under private or public control. These tensions have dominated the way in which Britain and other western societies have thought about the newer broadcasting media, but their origins are older and more complex than studies of contemporary media acknowledge.

This book offers a much-needed study of the Victorian novel's role in representing and shaping the service sector's emergence. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, it traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel.