Theme: Victorians
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Gay marriage supposedly interferes with “traditional marriage,” say its opponents. “We have at least 6,000 years of recorded history on our side,” remarked Kris Mineau, president of the conservative group Massachusetts Family Institute. People like Mineau assume that the traditional definition of the family is stable, unvarying and ancient. Read more
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From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue.Read more
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Pankaj Mishra speaks at the LSE about foreign imperialism and the Victorian period, as seen from an Asian perspective.Read more
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The sweet-tempered octogenarian I knew needed in his blindness to be helped gently across carpeted floors. His preoccupations, notably Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, were above all philological. His father had taught in English, which Borges used to say was the first language he ever spoke, though you would probably not have guessed it.Read more
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Like Hardy, Lawrence’s writing is extremely sensitive to issues of fear and courage. In Sons and Lovers the moral veto that Miriam places on sex before marriage is “unmasked” by her boyfriend Paul as merely fear finding an alibi in moral convention. In an extremely bold move Paul declares fear to be the evil, not sex. Read more
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If the popular perception remains that Victorians were hopelessly mired in repression and prudery, Lutz seeks to capture the shuddering underbelly of Victorian societyRead more
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Edmund Burke’s time has come. The idea that the eighteenth-century Irish-born British statesman and writer is especially relevant today, in an age that is often described as “postmodern,” may seem odd, or perhaps presumptuous.Read more
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Flanders’s book is more than a catalogue of crimes and their subsequent incarnations in popular culture. Over 500 pages it builds into an alternative history of the Victorian ageRead more
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This essay analyses the relationship between the uncanny and time by focusing on the notion of ‘time-slip’ as reflected in three American novels of the 1970s: Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return and Stephen King’s The Shining. Through a comparative analysis of these texts, the essay inquires into the relationship of modernity with time and the past, as well as into modern paradigms of continuity and influence, and the image of the nineteenth century as divulged in popular culture.Read more
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