English Lexemes Nominating Nobility Semantics and Evolution under Different Socio-cultural Context

The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that, although the interaction of history, culture and language is constantly in the field of view of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language, it has not yet received a complete analysis in detail, in particular, when describing the language pictures of different countries. The aim of the work is to prove that the semantics of the words of nominating titles of the English nobility of the Victorian era has not changed. The materials for the work were modern and classical, starting from the XIX century, word usage from the English language, contained in modern media texts from Internet sources, as well as the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century. At least 2000 such word usages were analyzed using the method of etymological analysis, the method of semantic analysis and the method of functional analysis, which allowed us to obtain a reliable picture of their functioning. The triple union of history, culture and language in the approach to the study of linguistic pictures of different countries is at the center of research in recent years. The interaction of these phenomena has become the subject of close attention in many articles and dissertations of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language. Lexemes denoting the noble status of a person are important concepts of the British national linguistic picture of the world and culture. The semantics of lexemes was studied according to lexicographic sources. The sources of examples of contextual use were the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century and modern English-language texts of the Internet: online versions of newspapers, advertising texts, blogs. To achieve the goal of our research, the article uses such methods as the method of continuous sampling, the method of lexicographic description, the comparative method, the statistical method, and a number of others.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project and Ian McGuire’s The North Water

The neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

The concept of classes in early work of F. Engels

In 2020 the scientific community celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels with numerous publications, conferences, and meetings. But as if by tradition representatives of various social and humanitarian disciplines, including sociologists, were and remain to this day, surprisingly inattentive (or indifferent) to the concepts of classes and class analysis presented by the founder of Marxism in his first book «The Condition of the Working Class in England», published in 1845. Modern life writers of F. Engels usually rank the work as a genre of high-quality journalistic investigations, as an engaged political journalism, as the first publications on the problem of urbanization, and as one of the best examples of a fiction book about the life and customs of the Victorian era. The article substantiates its belonging to the social and humanitarian science in accordance with today’s ideas about the relevance of scientific research. A sociological explication and interpretation of the views on the formation, evolution and prospects for the participation of large groups of people in the process of transforming social orders are proposed. The first part presents the biographical context of Engels’ writing of his first major work, as well as some post-biographical facts about the memory of his stay in Manchester in connection with the living conditions of English workers. The second part lists those conceptual constructs that can be taken for the concept of classes.

Gents and Working Girls

Tommy Tune’s earliest work as a director-choreographer engaged with issues of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The Club was an evening of songs and jokes set in an exclusive Victorian-era men’s club that featured all roles played by women. Tune led the cast in creating a stylized body language that approximated male behavior but, as performed by women, blurred gender lines in ways both challenging and exhilarating. The cross-gender performance of this material laid bare its misogyny without overstatement, and The Club was a long-running off-Broadway hit. Tune next joined the creative team of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, based on a true story about the closing of a bordello prompted by a crusading television personality. As choreographer and co-director, with Peter Masterson, Tune injected a burst of musical comedy brightness into the homey musical. His creativity was boundless, and numbers featuring macho, clog-dancing football players and a female drill team made up of both live dancers and life-size sex dolls were crowd pleasers that also contributed to the show’s sly skewing of culture and politics.

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Arthur Conan Doyle in Mesmeric Edinburgh and Hypnotic London

Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualist interests are often viewed today as idiosyncratic for a medical professional and anachronistic for the late Victorian era. However, historians of the era recognise that there was widespread fascination at this time in the possibility of communicating with the dead and the development of extraordinary mental powers like telepathy. Conan Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh where the study of mesmerism and its role in therapy continued for much longer than the rest of Britain. The university and medical school produced most of the major names of British medical mesmerism including the physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism. By the late nineteenth century, there were many distinguished physicians and scientists who shared Conan Doyle's spiritualist views. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the elite London association that investigated these possibilities using a scientific methodology. Hypnotism and the trance state were important tools in this study. Over the course of his thirty-six-year membership, Conan Doyle's convictions strengthened. The backdrop of Edinburgh and mesmerism is key to Conan Doyle's story ‘ John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) , while the scientific investigation of hypnotism described in The Parasite (1894) relies upon his experiences with London's SPR based in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and Hanover Square in Mayfair.

Flexible Workers: The Politics of Homework in Postindustrial Britain

This article opens up a new perspective on market liberalism's triumph in the late twentieth century through an examination of the political battles that were fought in Britain over the regulation of homework. Ubiquitous in the late Victorian era, this form of waged labor was curtailed by Edwardian wage regulations but resurged in the 1970s as a result of competition from low-wage economies abroad and fast-changing consumer tastes. Alongside growing use of homeworkers in consumer industries, new information technologies made it increasingly possible for some forms of professional work to move into the home. This article explores the debates that swirled around these different forms of homework, pitting antipoverty campaigners, feminists, and activists against ministers, employers, and civil servants. It shows how Conservative and New Labour governments failed to recognize the structural similarities between Victorian-style “sweated” labor and the emerging world of telework, freelancing, and self-employment, and how the intellectual excitement generated by Britain's transition toward a postindustrial future dovetailed with the New Right commitment to deregulation and the creation of “flexible” labor markets. A brief comparison with homework in the United States underlines the value of local, particular histories to our larger understanding of ideological change in modern societies.

Scandal in Somers town: conspiracism and Catholic schools in early Victorian England

The middle years of the nineteenth century are notable in the history of Catholicism in England for the development of the ‘papal aggression’ crisis. Catholic emancipation had been met with suspicion by Protestant groups and this suspicion grew into violent antipathy with the publication by Nicholas Wiseman of ‘Ex Porta Flaminia.’ At the same time that this crisis was emerging, Catholic charitable organizations were also attempting to garner support from the state for the building of Catholic schools. With a boom in the poor, urban population, fuelled by the arrival of Irish refugees, this assistance was urgently required. In the midst of this a small school in the heart of London became the focus of a cause célèbre. The belief that this school had been funded by lucre, defrauded from dying and vulnerable members of the Somers Town community by simonist priests, provided the source of a widespread conspiracy theory. The result of this conspiracy theory was a lawsuit, brought in 1851 by the relatives of a deceased benefactor of the school, against the newly enthroned Cardinal Wiseman. Metairie vs. Wiseman became one of the most celebrated and cited cases of the early Victorian era.