Melissa Dickson - Böcker

What did it mean to hear, for the first time, what George Eliot described as 'that roar which lies on the other side of silence'? Rapid developments in nineteenth-century acoustic science and communications technologies opened up new worlds beyond the limits of normal audibility for the Victorian public. Weaving together explorations of scientific developments with imaginative cultural, spiritual, and literary responses, this book sets out to explore the burgeoning field of acoustics in the nineteenth century and the new language, structure, and conceptual models it offered to broker the boundaries of the individual self. Ranging from Eliot's Middlemarch to Du Maurier's Trilby, and from Laënnec's work on the stethoscope to experiments on animal audition, inquiries into the unconscious, and spiritualist investigations of the hidden world of vibrations, it demonstrates the profound challenge to the boundaries of the human that was issued by new sound technologies in the Victorian period.

An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain Fresh readings of canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in WonderlandDiverse primary sources analysing the presence of the Arabian Nights in distinct areas of cultural production: constructions of childhood, archaeological and geological science, theatrical display, and exhibitionsAladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape? Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found

An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain An overview of the cultural transmission of the Arabian Nights within nineteenth-century Britain Fresh readings of canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in WonderlandDiverse primary sources analysing the presence of the Arabian Nights in distinct areas of cultural production: constructions of childhood, archaeological and geological science, theatrical display, and exhibitionsAladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape? Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. She explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. She also argues for a view of these tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found

This volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of ‘modern life’. Chapters in the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces how physiological and psychological problems were constituted in relation to each other and to their social contexts, offering new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, 'Good health and well-being'.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.