British Victorians were obsessed with fluids-with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to ...provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. InThe Social Life of Fluids, Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel.
Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids-blood, breast milk, and water-in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment.
Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.
In Little Em'ly, the church-yard scene, with its snow-covered cathedral, ghostly tombstones, strangely lighted windows and mystic towers, is impressively realistic; and when the murmur of a reed ...organ mingles with the voices of a boy choir "doing the slow music," the sympathetic audience is hushed into a delicious state of solemn attention. The Octave is added to heighten the general effect and to give power to the organ as a whole. In the hands of a good leader, the organ would be in more or less use every night, and, in more ways than can be explained, he would be constantly drawing upon its resources to aid his band, or to heighten the effect of some dramatic situation. In such places an organ like this would give new interest to the band and increase
Adventures in Slumberland Schotland, Helena M
Lancet neurology,
December 2018, 2018-12-00, 20181201, Letnik:
17, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Among the stories is that of Alex, a martial arts teacher and personal trainer with obstructive sleep apnoea, who teaches himself to play the didgeridoo. Brian Thomas dreams that his vacation camper ...has been broken into and he bravely fights off the invaders, only to awaken and find that he has strangled his wife to death during a bout of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep behaviour disorder. 38-year-old AK suffers from sexsomnia, a form of parasomnia where an individual engages in sexual acts while in non-REM sleep. Nicholls describes the principles of CBT-i—sleep diaries, sleep hygiene, sleep restriction, stimulus control, articulatory suppression and progressive muscular relaxation, among others—and how they can be applied to overcome sleepless nights, forming a helpful guide for anyone wanting to delve deeper into treatment of this common disorder.
In this series of sketches Dickens brings the city of London and its inhabitants vividly to life. His travels take him to the workhouse, the theatre, and further afield to the Liverpool docks and the ...Paris morgue. Combining autobiography with reportage, the book showcases Dickens's characteristic wit, humour, and social concerns.
Feminist criticism has not been kind to Charles Dickens. The characters George Orwell referred to as 'legless angels' - Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and others - have been conjured ...as evidence of Dickens' inability to create 'real' women. Critics wishing to rescue him have turned to the dark, angry women - Nancy, Lady Dedlock, Miss Wade - who disrupt the calm surface of some of Dickens' novels. In this book Hilary M. Schor argues that the role of the good daughter is interwoven with that of her angry double in Dickens' fiction, and is the centre of narrative authority in the Dickens' novel. As the good daughters must leave their father's house and enter the world of the marketplace, they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's uncertain legal status and her power of narrative gave Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.
Speaking Amazonian O’DONNELL, MOLLY C.
The Gaskell journal,
01/2016, Letnik:
30
Journal Article
Recenzirano
That Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford was begun in response to Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers is hardly a revelation considering its original title (The Cranford Papers) and its publication in ...Dickens’s journal Household Words. However, through a close study of the linguistic style of Gaskell’s novel, what becomes evident is that she articulated an alternative language to that of the male ‘tales novel’, as I term it, in direct response to Dickens’s representation of a male social language in Pickwick. The present study applies sociolinguistic studies of men’s and women’s speech in homosocial communities to demonstrate that these popular Victorian works employ the language of their respective gender’s community to derive their organising principles, structure, narration, content, and logic. This analysis emphasises differences between the language of the men’s club (indirect, wandering, and hierarchical) and that of the women’s community, which reflects a collective desire for togetherness through, for example, engaged narration, questioning, and digression with purpose. By analysing the linguistic communities of practice in Cranford as distinctively female, I show that Gaskell presents an alternative feminine literary tradition to the male tales novel and an alternative female Victorian homosocial ‘club’.
This article explores Charles Dickens’s unusual characterisation of vagrant figures in his novel Bleak House. Dickens conceived of the vagrant as a public entity without any recourse to private ...spaces — a thesis supported here by the novel and a series of satellite texts by Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Edwin Chadwick. This conception, in turn, is both a reflection, and a perceived cause, of the vagrant’s intellectual, moral and physical degeneration. Beginning with a brief overview of vagrancy in the nineteenth century, before moving on to a discussion about Dickens’s atypical depiction of vagrant characters, this paper examines both the public presentation of vagrants and the dangers that they were perceived to pose to society at large. In doing this, this article seeks to unpick how one of the great Victorian social critics perceived the problem of nineteenth-century vagrancy and its social ramifications.
Walt Whitman's admiration for Charles Dickens's work is well documented. Dickens's visit to the USA in 1842 prompted Whitman to write a defense of 'Boz' against the charge that his characters, and in ...particular his bad characters, were exaggerated and unrealistic; for Whitman, Dickens was guilty of nothing more than depicting vice 'in all its glaring reality' in order to teach his readers 'how terrible a thing is iniquity'. Whitman saw in Dickens a writer committed, like the American poet himself, to celebrating the teeming life of the city, and recognizing the value of even the most apparently insignificant lives; his 'lines are imbued, from preface to finis, with that philosophy which teaches to pull down the high and bring up the low'. Whitman's attentive reading of his great English contemporary can also be seen in his use of the title 'What's the Row?' in one of his earliest pieces on American politics for the New York Aurora, echoing the words with which the Artful Dodger greets a bemused Oliver Twist on their first meeting in the novel.
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