scholarly journals Jekyll, Hyde and the Victorian Construction of Criminal Working-Class Masculinities

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
Lydia Katsouli Pantzidou
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Many ◽  
Post Industrial

Violent crime has long been associated with ideas of insane and/or intrinsically dangerous masculinities in the global north. Victorian Gothic literature, generated during a period when positivist discourse around dangerousness, madness and crime was gaining in authority and coherence, provides particularly useful insights into the narratives underpinning these associations. This paper focuses on the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which, being a work of cautionary horror written during an era of powerful cultural fascination with violent urban crime is particularly rich in such discourse. A range of methodological tools borrowed from literary criticism, legal studies and discourse analysis turn Stevenson's novella into a penetrative lens to examine the anxieties of 19th century medico-legal thinking. The many layers of the Jekyll-Hyde binary are analysed along a series of other relevant binaries that characterise many Victorian narratives around crime: reason against insanity, normativity against deviance, and respectable bourgeois masculinities against uncontrollable working-class masculinities, whose savage sexuality poses a threat to social order. Contextualised historically as part of the wider fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration theory, as well as legally, having followed a long series of legislative and policing moves to control the disconcerting underclasses amassing in urban spaces, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde arises as a uniquely informative testament of the profound contradictions of a terrified post-Industrial Revolution Europe – what Moretti (1982) would call a dialectic of fear. Narratives such as the ones unfurling in the Strange Case are not, however, taken as mere reflections of the activities and anxieties of the Victorian medico-legal apparatus. Rather, this paper finds that the tensions permeating the novella constitute elements of a wider narrative construct whose main achievement was the validation and naturalisation of a deeply rigid social taxonomy, justifying the exertion of social and legal control upon populations inscribed as monstrous and Other. Keywords: Law and Literature, Criminology, Victorian Studies, Masculinities, Legal Psychiatry

Rateable Assessment as a Data Source for Status Area Analysis: the Example of Edinburgh 1855–1962

Urban History ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 92-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Spatial Segregation ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Post Industrial

Research has revealed spatial segregation of status groups to be characteristic feature of many urban settlements. Sjoberg has identified such areas in pre-industrial cities although many have argued that marked spatial segregation primarily occurred in post-Industrial Revolution cities. Much interest has surrounded detailed analysis of settlements, or parts thereof, within particular historical eras, e.g. Victorian studies, but the study of the status areas of a settlement over a longer time period has received less attention. This article resulted from a study of status areas in Edinburgh at three points in time: 1855, 1914 and 1962.

scholarly journals The Future: 10 Challenges for Sustainability

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Caradonna
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
Cooperative Effort ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sustainability Movement ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Many ◽  
Post Industrial

Growing concerns about climate-change pollutants, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, resource shortages, and the world’s gamut of ecological problems have placed new pressures on sustainists. Creating a sustainable society that thrives within its biophysical limits is no longer seen as a distant and utopian objective; it’s now an urgent matter that, if neglected or mismanaged, will bring devastating consequences for the planet and the human economy that lives off of it. The increased political attention, institutional support, and financial commitment to the cause of sustainability means heightened expectations for immediate, tangible results. The public doesn’t want idle chatter; it wants workable solutions to very real problems. Can sustainists seize the moment and lead the transition to the sustainable future? The quest to create a sustainable society faces a host of obstacles, and many pressing questions remain unanswered: How can the entrenched political and corporate interests that perpetuate unsustainability be overcome? How can society willingly transform itself? Where will the money and political will come from to coordinate the transition? Will this sustainable society be “industrialized” or “post-industrial,” “globalized” or “localized”? Will the changes be top–down, bottom–up, or both? By charting the growth and development of sustainability since 1700, this book has not meant to imply that ecotopia is an inevitable end point. Even optimists concede that it’s quite possible that the task is too tall, that industrial society could drive itself straight into the ground, that collapse is a real threat, and that the Industrial Revolution was the first phase of humanity’s protracted extinction event. If sustainability does succeed in undoing the many harms that have caused our ecological predicament, it will only do so with the broad support of the public and through a cooperative effort to adapt and transform. At the risk of bombast, it will have to change the course of human history, and that’s no easy task. This book ends with a discussion of 10 challenges faced by the sustainability movement.

Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Education Pipeline ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Narrative Mapping

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

Gentrification and neighborhood melancholy. Collective sadness and ambivalence in Dortmund’s Hörde district

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
The Phoenix

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.

Step It Up and Go

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Menconi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
College Town ◽  
American Idol ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Many ◽  
Nina Simone

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

Iconographies of ‘Childness’ and the Contemporary British Novel: Book Covers, Discourses, and Cultural Models

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-738
Author(s):  
Ralf Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood ◽  
The Many ◽  
Post Industrial

Abstract A sizeable segment of the contemporary British fiction market for adult readers consists of novels that focus on children and childhood. In accordance with interdisciplinary Childhood Studies, such texts can be understood as contributions to the social construction of children and childhood, or ‘childness’. Such constructions appear to be in particular demand in this phase of late modernity, when childhood is conceptualized as an antidote to the many uncertainties contemporary post-industrial societies are faced with. While on the level of societies, public constructions of childhood are best understood in terms of a Foucauldian notion of discourse, discourses are not what individual readers and book-buyers actually have in their minds when choosing a title. Rather, this article argues that the cover illustrations of these novels both activate and reinforce cultural models of ‘childness’ that readers have stored as schemata shared with their cultural community. On the basis of this alignment of discourse theory with a concept from cognitive anthropology, the article demonstrates that book covers play a role in maintaining particular conceptions of ‘childness’, and in feeding them back into the minds of the readers. Furthermore, the relevance of the book as a material artefact is once again acknowledged.1

Metaphysical Exile

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Detailed Interpretation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
Late Modern

This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.

The Institutional Foundations of Religious Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 2050006
Author(s):  
Mark Koyama
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
General Rules ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Institutional Foundations

How did religious freedom emerge? I address this question by building on the framework of Johnson and Koyama’s Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (2019). First, I establish that premodern societies, reliant on identity rules, were incapable of liberalism and religious freedom. Identity rules and restrictions on religious freedom were part of a political-economy equilibrium that ensured social order. Second, I examine developments like the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, as shocks to this premodern identity rules and conditional toleration equilibrium. Finally, I consider several examples that support the claim that the move from identity rules to general rules allowed religious freedom to flourish.

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