Product Description

This book gathers together, in one volume, some of the key pieces on Victorian history, society and culture and draws on new trends in looking at the Victorian Age and includes sections on, periodization, politics and consumerism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #414291 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From the Back Cover

What does the Age of Steam have to say to the Age of the Internet?

New ideas about gender, race, language, space and material culture have transformed the way the Victorians are being discussed today. The Victorian Studies Reader brings together for the first time the best of these international writings about the period. Not only do Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam consider familiar themes such as parliamentary reform and poverty, but they also look at the mesmerist, the barmaid and the cosmopolitan man about town.  New light is shed on the Chartists, the British Empire and Darwinian evolution, while other readings challenge conventional views about Victorian religion, morality and hypocrisy.  Each reading is prefaced by a helpful commentary placing the work in context.
 
In their wide-ranging introduction, Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam not only illuminate how the Victorians have been imagined since the death of Victoria, but they also make a powerful argument for the importance of the Victorian inheritance today.  They reveal how the field has been reshaped over the last generation by the rise of cultural history and cross-disciplinary conversation, and establish a challenging agenda for Victorian studies in the twenty-first century.

The Victorian Studies Reader will appeal to all those who want to know more about the world of the Victorians.

About the Author

Kelly Boyd teaches at the University of London. She edited the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (1999) and is the author of Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855-1940 (2003).

Rohan McWilliam is Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and author of Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (1998) and The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (2007).

Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam, Richard Price, Martin Wiener, P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, Erika Rappaport, Chris Breward, Patrick Joyce, Mary Poovey, Simon Gunn, Jonathan Parry, Gareth Stedman Jones, Anna Clark, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Stefan Collini, Boyd Hilton, Callum Brown, Adrian Desmond, James A. Secord, Gillian Beer, Alison Winter, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, John Tosh, Ellen Ross, Michael Mason, Lynda Nead, Judith Walkowitz, Elaine Showalter, Peter Bailey, John Plunkett, Catherine Hall