Sally Ledger – författare

In an important contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies in the Humanities, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students and scholars a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology, Anthropology and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

In an important contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies in the Humanities, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students and scholars a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology, Anthropology and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

The relationship between the work of Charles Dickens and popular literature has often been noted, but the extent to which his fiction and journalism were rooted in, and continued to respond to, the popular radical culture of his time had so far been unexplored. Sally Ledger traces the influence of Regency radicals, such as William Hone and William Cobbett, and mid-century radical writers, such as Douglas Jerrold and the Chartists Ernest Jones and G. W. M. Reynolds. She offers substantial readings of works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit, arguing that Dickens's populism bridged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the 'popular', the first identified with the political idea of 'the People', the second identified with a mass-market 'populace' that emerged during Dickens's career. Richly illustrated, this study also uncovers the resonance between Dickens's writings and popular graphic art by George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, C. J. Grant and others.

Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle scrutinises ways in which current conflicts of 'race', class, and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de siècle, whose influence stretched from the 1890s, when economic depression signalled the end of Britain's role as 'the workshop of the world', to 1914 when world war accelerated imperial decline. This collaborative venture by new and established scholars includes discussion of the 'New Woman', the reconstruction of masculinities, and of feminism and empire. The imperialist theme is pursued in essays on Yeats and Ireland, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the figure of the vampire. The rise of socialism and psychoanalysis, and the relationship between nascent modernism and late twentieth-century postmodernism are also addressed in this radical account.

The relationship between the work of Charles Dickens and popular literature has often been noted, but the extent to which his fiction and journalism were rooted in, and continued to respond to, the popular radical culture of his time had so far been unexplored. Sally Ledger traces the influence of Regency radicals, such as William Hone and William Cobbett, and mid-century radical writers, such as Douglas Jerrold and the Chartists Ernest Jones and G. W. M. Reynolds. She offers substantial readings of works from Pickwick to Little Dorrit, arguing that Dickens's populism bridged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the 'popular', the first identified with the political idea of 'the People', the second identified with a mass-market 'populace' that emerged during Dickens's career. Richly illustrated, this study also uncovers the resonance between Dickens's writings and popular graphic art by George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, C. J. Grant and others.

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional representations with the lived experience of the new woman, Ledger's book makes a major contribution to an understanding of the 'woman question' at the fin de siecle. She alights on such disparate figures as Eleanor Marx, Gertrude Dix, Dracula, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner and Radclyffe Hall. Focusing mainly on the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the book's later chapters project forward into the twentieth century, considering the relationship between new woman fiction and early modernism as well as the socio-sexual inheritance of the 'second generation' new woman writers.

In recent years, feminist scholars, through their insistence on the key role of gender in critical analysis, have brought about a profound revitalization of literary and cultural studies. This text draws together work by leading exponents in the field. The essays explore the operations of gender in the production of knowledge and the formation of cultural representations in a wide variety of contexts, from German romantic poetry to the literature of AIDS, from Victorian ethnography to tabloid constructions of race. All of the essays engage in problems of representation, intervening in current debates in critical theory.

This new edition of Sally Ledger’s study on Henrik Ibsen includes a renewed bibliography and an expanded critical evaluation. It delivers readings of ten of Ibsen’s best-known plays including A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler. It also survey’s Ibsen’s total dramatic output, carefully situating his plays in his cultural, historical and intellectual contexts. Ibsen played a seminal role in the development of modern European drama at the end of the 19th century. Eschewing the comedies and melodramas of the mainstream theatre of his day, he is best known for his invention of theatrical realism and psychological drama. Ledger’s book traces the theatrical evolution of his plays as well as considering his impact on late-Victorian London, his response to the ‘woman question’, his anticipation of Freudian psychology and his debt to Darwinism.