Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.

Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.

Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, "Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic." Reuben Sachs, the story of an extended Anglo-Jewish family in London, focuses on the relationship between two cousins, Reuben Sachs and Judith Quixano, and the tensions between their Jewish identities and English society. The novel's complex and sometimes satirical portrait of Anglo-Jewish life, which was in part a reaction to George Eliot's romanticized view of Victorian Jews in Daniel Deronda, caused controversy on its first publication. This Broadview edition prints for the first time since its initial publication in The Jewish Chronicle Levy's essay "The Jew in Fiction." Other appendices include George Eliot's essay on anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian England and a chapter from Israel Zangwill's novel The Children of the Ghetto. Also included is a map of Levy's London with landmarks from her biography and from the "Jewish geography" of Reuben Sachs.

This book examines the Reading Room of the British Museum using documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary source. Roomscape explores a specific site - the Reading Room of the British Museum - as a space of imaginative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early 20th-century London. Drawing on archival materials, Roomscape is the first study to integrate documentary, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this space and its resources for women who wrote translations, poetry, and fiction. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image established by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Roomscape also questions the value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, Roomscape investigates the public, social, and spatial dimensions of literary production. The implications of this study reach into the current digital era and its transformations of practices of reading, writing, and archiving. Along with an appendix of notable readers at the British Museum from the last two centuries, the book contributes to scholarship on George Eliot, Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Virginia Woolf. It includes Appendix of Notable Readers at the British Museum from 1857-1930 (15 pp) as important resource for museum and library studies, and fresh material about translation work at the British Museum by Eleanor Marx (on Flaubert and Ibsen) and Constance Black Garnett (on Russian authors). It demonstrates the importance of library research for poets including Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Amy Levy. It examines George Eliot's research at the British Museum for her historical novel Romola in relation to how this novel depicts reading, library collection, and gendered scholarship.. It offers a new reading of Virginia Woolf's researching in and writing about the British Museum and the London Library through her diaries, letters, and creative work. It includes a Coda that brings forward the story of the Round Reading Room from the mid-20th century, when A. S. Byatt, Isobel Armstrong, and Gillian Beer relied on this space in the early years of their careers, to the aftermath since the official closing in 1997 when the British Library moved to Euston Road. The fate of the Round Reading Room still hangs in the balance.

Susan Bernstein examines the gendered power relationships embedded in confessional literature of the Victorian period. Exploring this dynamic in Charlotte Bronta's "Villette," Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret," George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda," and Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," she argues that although women's disclosures to male confessors repeatedly depict wrongdoing committed against them, they themselves are viewed as the transgressors. Bernstein emphasizes the secularization of confession, but she also places these narratives within the context of the anti-Catholic tract literature of the time. Based on cultural criticism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, Bernstein's analysis constitutes a reassessment of Freud's and Foucault's theories of confession. In addition, her study of the anti-Catholic propaganda of the mid-nineteenth century and its portrayal of confession provides historical background to the meaning of domestic confessions in the literature of the second half of the century.
Originally published in 1997.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Romance of a Shop is an early "New Woman" novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own home in central London after their father's death and their loss of financial security. In this novel, Amy Levy examines both the opportunities and dangers of urban experience for women in the late nineteenth century who pursue independent work rather than follow the established paths of domestic service. By outfitting her characters as photographers, Levy emphasizes the importance of the gendered gaze in this narrative of the modern city. This Broadview edition prints for the first time since the 1880s Levy's essay on Christina Rossetti and a short story set in North London, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine The Woman's World. Other appendices include poetry by Levy, Michael Field, Dollie Radford, and A. Mary F. Robinson, and essays on Victorian photography, literary realism, "the woman question" at the end of the nineteenth century, and the plight of women working in London.

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, the work of William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of this polymath, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across the book’s five sections – “Art and Design,” “Literature,” “Political Contexts,” “Pasts and Presents,” and “Digital Humanities” – readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching beyond the classroom by way of books, museums, and digital resources.