Real and imagined Greek women in Victorian perceptions of ‘1821’

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Despotopoulou ◽  
Efterpi Mitsi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Victorian Popular Culture

The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s – the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior – arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism, which depended on the legacy of ancient Greece as justification for the cause of the country’s liberation, and instead construct new myths about Greece, participating in the discursive production of its national fantasy. They also provide the opportunity of reconsidering the cultural position of Modern Greece in the Victorian period beyond the division between Hellenism and Orientalism.

scholarly journals Unintended Authors: Piracy, Plagiarism and Property in Victorian Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Monica Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Victorian Popular Culture

The introduction to this special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, “Unintended Authors,” argues that Victorian popular fictions crucially relied on incoherently regulated global artistic markets that made bargain-basement grabbing and reselling comme il faut. The absence of clear and uniform copyright statutes, case law, and trade practices across national, colonial, linguistic, and generic borders surprisingly did not obstruct nineteenth-century authorship; rather these conditions did the work of cultivating an extraordinary proliferation of scrappy innovators creatively reusing antecedents. A cast of rogue publishers, theatrical adaptors, and proto brand managers take centre stage here in an effort to recognize the collaborative, appropriative, and reiterative dimensions of nineteenth-century fictional entertainment.

Victorian and Edwardian Jewish Doctors

2003 ◽  
pp. 11-42
Author(s):  
John Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Teaching Hospitals ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The University ◽  
Middle Class Families

This chapter discusses Jewish doctors of the Victorian and Edwardian period, demonstrating why there were so few of them in England in comparison with their numbers in Continental Europe. If Jews wanted a higher education in the early Victorian period, they had to go to the University of London; elsewhere there were restrictions on the admission of Jews to the universities. Mindful, no doubt, of the potential obstacles, Jewish parents in lower-middle-class families as well as from the Anglo-Jewish elite remained reluctant to allow their sons to study medicine. Accordingly, the number of Jewish doctors remained small in Victorian England, both within and outside London. Notwithstanding some antisemitism facing Jews trying to obtain hospital posts in the mid-nineteenth century, English and Welsh society was more open in the late Victorian and Edwardian years than it was to be between the two world wars, and a number of Jews rose to eminence in the medical profession, holding appointments as consultants in the London teaching hospitals and elsewhere.

scholarly journals Nineteenth-Century Sentimental and Popular Trends and their Transformation in Fin-de-siècle Latvian Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 162-172
Author(s):  
Benedikts Kalnačs ◽  
Pauls Daija
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Literary Techniques

In this paper, the role of popular culture in fin-de-siècle Latvian literature has been explored by analysing the mid-nineteenth century Latvian translation of Christoph Schmid’s novel Genoveva (1846) by Ansis Leitāns, and unfinished drama Genoveva (1908) by Rūdolfs Blaumanis. While the first version of the Genoveva story was created according to the patterns of popular literature and played a significant role in the development of the Latvian reading public, the author of the second version attempted to turn the plot of popular fiction into a work of elite literature, elaborating the issue of female agency and adding psychological ambiguity to the plot. The mixture of popular melodramatic imagination and modernist themes, as observed in Blaumanis’s work, provides a deeper insight into fin-de-siècle literary techniques by turning attention to the conscious use of different literary styles and narrative levels and illuminating interactions between popular and elite culture. By comparing both works and interpreting their aesthetic innovations in terms of the relationship between idealism, realism and modernism, this paper traces the ways in which fin-de-siècle Latvian literature appropriated and reworked models of popular culture and developed new aesthetic insights by merging elements of low and high culture.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
New Work ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Victorian Popular Culture

The Introduction surveys the divergent representations of babyhood in the nineteenth century. It situates the present study at the intersection of new work on the modern family and changing parenting realities, as well as historical childhood and child care. After a detailed discussion of the most influential or mainstream portrayals of infancy in Victorian popular culture, such as the sentimentalized baby, the baby as victim in social reform writing, and the commodified baby, the Introduction addresses the importance of unusual, yet culturally significant depictions, including comical or sensationalized babies in fiction. How did these portrayals transform cultural fantasies and genre developments? How did iconic depictions of babyhood reflect, distort, or endeavour to change the lived realities of young children in Victorian Britain? The texts selected for close reading in the subsequent chapters include material that reveals unexpected sides to Victorian infancy, as well as works that have had a catalysing function for changing representational strategies. Critical attention to the diverse and at times ambiguous depiction of infancy in Victorian culture thus also produces new readings of canonical works that have hitherto not been considered from this angle.

Inventing the Cave Man

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Horrall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Freak Shows ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

Cave men are among the most widely recognised characters in global popular culture. They look like modern humans and inhabit a humorously archaic, but scientifically invalid version of the contemporary world. They battle dinosaurs, use comic technology like foot-powered cars, and drag women by the hair. This illustrated book is the first systematic investigation of the character’s evolution from pre-modern freak shows and fascinations with apes, to mid-nineteenth century evidence of dinosaurs, ancient hominids and evolution. Suddenly, long-held scientific and religious beliefs came into question, provoking public debates that inspired British satirical magazines, performers in the emerging entertainment industry, writers and eventually filmmakers and television companies. Ancient hominids were first depicted as explicitly simian and threatening, though by the end of the century the familiar, modern cave man had emerged. Humour has always been the most common tone for evoking human prehistory, because it allowed unsettling subjects to be addressed indirectly. As evolutionary ideas became more acceptable and Europe’s ancient past became better known, cartoonists began using prehistory to satirise contemporary middle-class Britain. Their cave men looked like the male, Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of that world, while the situations they depicted affirmed Victorian ideas about race, gender, nation and empire. This British cave man travelled throughout the English-speaking world, establishing the broad parameters within which our earliest ancestors continue to be depicted in popular culture.

A ‘Northern Athens’? Cultural and intellectual life

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-139
Author(s):  
Alice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Music Literature ◽  
Scientific Associations

In the Victorian period, Belfast was known as the ‘Northern Athens’ – a title which referred to the city’s cultural and intellectual credentials. The term was still being used in the early twentieth century. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the city’s cultural societies struggled to survive, Belfast’s cultural claims were increasingly under question. By the end of the century it was felt that Belfast was now known more for its hard-headed business character than for its culture. This chapter assesses the cultural and intellectual life of Victorian Belfast and questions the validity of the ‘cultural centre to cultural desert’ narrative. It offers a nuanced discussion of the city’s cultural strengths and weaknesses and those of comparable provincial centres elsewhere. Cultural and scientific associations are examined in some detail; and theatre, music, literature and newspapers are all covered. In addition, the mental intellectual landscape of Belfast’s middle-class elite is discussed.

The Academy Abroad: The Nineteenth-Century Origin of the British School at Athens

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Beard ◽  
Christopher Stray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early History ◽  
British School ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Of Greece

This chapter focuses on the foundation and early history of the British School at Athens. It shows how the story of such foreign institutes intersects with many of the key issues in the rethinking of the Classics in the late Victorian period. These issues involve: the role of archaeology within the study of Classics, how archaeology was to be defined and bounded, and the relationship between the study of Classics and the modern lands of Greece and Italy, particularly in the light of growing middle class tourism and its infrastructures.

Victorian Theatre

2015 ◽  
pp. 658-674
Author(s):  
Katherine Newey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance

The theatre was a significant institution of public life in the nineteenth century, and an important source of aesthetic innovation and entrepreneurial energy in Victorian culture. The theatre offers an important perspective on Victorian affect and attitudes to the real. However, drama, theatre, and performance have been overlooked in subsequent histories of Victorian public life and culture, in part because of the theatre’s uncomfortable position between high art and popular culture. Despite its popularity, Victorian attitudes towards the theatre and drama were ambivalent, oscillating between huge enjoyment of spectacle, farce, melodrama, and pantomime, and concern over the moral standards and commercial status of the theatre. For scholars of the Victorian period, the Victorian theatre has a rich archive not limited to the dramatic text, and indicative of the interconnections between performance, dramatic literature, and visual culture.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

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