scholarly journals Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Commercial Imagery

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

scholarly journals Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Commercial Imagery

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

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.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Couleurs à la mode. Impressionism as an Effect of the Chemical Industry

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Wolf Kittler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Effect ◽  
Chemical Industry ◽  
Synthetic Dyes ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Realist Novels

"Die Erfindung von Anilin und anderen synthetischen Farbstoffen in der zweiten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts ist der Beginn einer neuen Epoche. Die von der noch jungen chemischen Industrie produzierten neuen Farben sind nicht nur leuchtender als die meisten der traditionellen Farbstoffe, sondern auch viel billiger. Sie verändern das Aussehen von Frauen auf den Straßen der modernen Stadt. Unter den ersten Medien, die diese Revolution bemerken und dokumentieren, sind Modezeitschriften, realistische Romane und impressionistische Gemälde. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die strahlenden Farben der neuen Palette der impressionistischen Maler ein direkter Effekt der chemischen Industrie sind. </br></br>The invention of aniline and other synthetic dyes in the second half of the nineteenth century is the beginning of a new epoch. The new colors produced by the fledgling chemical industry are not only brighter than most of the traditional dyestuffs, but also much cheaper. They change the appearance of women on the streets of the modern city. Among the first media to notice and document this revolution are fashion magazines, realist novels, and Impressionist paintings. I argue that the bright colors on the new palette of Impressionist painters are a direct effect of the chemical industry. "

scholarly journals ‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-511
Author(s):  
Amanda Sciampacone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Climate And Health ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

Race Rescue

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 34-68
Author(s):  
Richard Eves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Fallen Woman

Abstract This paper examines Methodist missionary discourse in Papua at the turn of the nineteenth century, locating two themes: what I call a pathology of desire, to be found in the polemical missionary discourses directed at sexuality, immorality and licentiousness, and a pathology of culture, to be found in their polemical discourses against abortion, infanticide and child-rearing practices. Together, these pathologies were seen as the main causes of population decline. The two discourses, constantly at play, produce a doubled image of Papuan women – the fallen woman and the bad mother – which, it was considered, necessitated the intervention of “a civilising mission.” This involved race rescue – the isolation of those thought vulnerable (children and young women) on the mission station, away from the dangers of the villages, at the same time instilling in them their own notions of sexual morality, and above all the training of Papuan women in European models of motherhood and domesticity, so they would become good wives and mothers.

scholarly journals Novel market inefficiencies from early Victorian times

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Odlyzko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Bond Market ◽  
Government Bond ◽  
British Government ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Market Inefficiencies ◽  
Corporate Capitalism ◽  
The Government ◽  
Pricing Anomaly

A previously unknown pricing anomaly existed for a few years in the late 1840s in the British government bond market, in which the larger and more liquid of two very large bonds was underpriced. None of the published mechanisms explains this phenomenon. It may be related to another pricing anomaly that existed for much of the nineteenth century in which terminable annuities were significantly underpriced relative to so-called ‘perpetual’ annuities that dominated the government bond market. The reasons for these mispricings seem to lie in the early Victorian culture, since the basic economic incentives as well as laws and institutions were essentially the familiar modern ones. This provides new perspectives on the origins and nature of modern corporate capitalism.

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