Anne-Julia Zwierlein - Böcker

This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history. It revisits the origins of many modern debates about aging in the nineteenth century – a period that saw the emergence of cultural and scientific frameworks for the understanding of old age that continue to be influential today. The contributors provide fresh readings of canonical texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and others. The volume builds momentum in the burgeoning field of aging studies. It argues that the study of old age in the nineteenth century has entered a new and distinctly interdisciplinary phase that is characterized by a set of research interests that are currently shared across a range of disciplines and that explore conceptions of old age in the nineteenth century by privileging, respectively, questions of agency, of place, of gender and sexuality, and of narrative and aesthetic form.

This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history. It revisits the origins of many modern debates about aging in the nineteenth century – a period that saw the emergence of cultural and scientific frameworks for the understanding of old age that continue to be influential today. The contributors provide fresh readings of canonical texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and others. The volume builds momentum in the burgeoning field of aging studies. It argues that the study of old age in the nineteenth century has entered a new and distinctly interdisciplinary phase that is characterized by a set of research interests that are currently shared across a range of disciplines and that explore conceptions of old age in the nineteenth century by privileging, respectively, questions of agency, of place, of gender and sexuality, and of narrative and aesthetic form.

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 1910. Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women’s movement.Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, this book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation. Undertaking an archaeology of women’s presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women’s collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, this book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture and the symbolic ‘first speech’ of new suffrage recruits.Drawing on new and extensive primary research, this book intervenes in several flourishing fields of inquiry: literary studies, oral culture studies, sound and voice studies, performance studies, periodical studies and Victorian and Edwardian cultural history.

In bringing together a group of international experts on Victorian oral culture, this collection examines formats of public orality in the long nineteenth century from a cultural-historical perspective, treating the evolving scene of oral culture as a symptom and catalyst of social, political, and media change. The volume asks how nineteenth-century oral performances, alongside literary and journalistic mediations and representations of orality, ‘articulated’ social change by highlighting the multiplicity and increasingly complex intermediality of oral formats, as well as their own generic and mediatic malleability. The collection argues that the changing formats of oral speech can be seen as performative modes of presentation that were further differentiated by (shifting and intersectional) categories of identity, such as race, gender, and class. Across the various perspectives with which the individual essays approach orality, the volume, in emphasising the forms and formats of orality, firmly insists that represented speech is never merely ‘content’, but also performed ‘form’, with its own inherent performative politics.

This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.