The Picture of Dorian Gray (Print Copy) by
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The Picture of Dorian Graywas a succes de scandale. Early readers were shocked by its hints at unspeakable sins, and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. This definitive edition includes a selection of contemporary reviews condemning the novel's immorality, and the introduction to the first Penguin Classics edition by Peter Ackroyd.
Daughters of Decadence (Print Copy) by
At the turn of the century, short stories by -and often about- 'New Women' flooded the pages of English and American magazines like The Yellow Book, The Savoy, Atlantic Monthly and Harpers. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form, and courageous in its candid literary aspiration, shocked Victorian critics who parodied the experimental stories in Punch as symptoms of fin de siecle decadence, or denounced the authors as 'literary degenerates' or 'erotomaniacs'. This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories, including such little-known writers as Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Vernon Lee, Constance Fenimore Wollson and Charlotte Mew. Ranging from the lyrical to the Gothic, and frequently dealing with the conflicts of women artists, the short fiction of the fin de siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorianism women writers and the new era of feminist modernism.
Plays Unpleasant (Print Copy) by
With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences' complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers' Houses, depicts Harry Trench's dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fianc#65533;e comes from her father's income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven - who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs Warren's Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother's immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.
Henrik Ibsen - Four Major Plays (Print Copy) by
Taken from the highly acclaimed Oxford Ibsen, this collection of Ibsen's plays includes A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder.
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The Victorian Age (Print Copy) by
The Victorian Age introduces students of nineteenth-century literary and cultural history to the main areas of intellectual debate in the Victorian period. Bringing together for the first time in one volume a wide range of primary source material, this anthology gives readers a unique insight into the ways in which different areas of Victorian intellectual debate were interconnected. The Victorian Age covers developments in social and political theory, economics, science and religion, aesthetics, and sexuality and gender, and provides access to a range of documents which have hitherto been highly inaccessible - both difficult to locate and difficult to interpret and understand. This authoritative anthology contains: * a general introduction which explains the various ways in which the relationships between literary and intellectual culture can be theorised * essays describing the background to the areas of debate illustrated by the selected source documents * bibliographical notes on all the documents included * brief accounts of the reputation and career of the documents' authors. This volume will enable humanities students, as well as the general reader, to understand complex areas of debates in an unusually wide range of disciplines, several of which will be unfamiliar.
The Victorian Age (E-Book) by
The Victorian Age introduces students of nineteenth-century literary and cultural history to the main areas of intellectual debate in the Victorian period. Bringing together for the first time in one volume a wide range of primary source material, this anthology gives readers a unique insight into the ways in which different areas of Victorian intellectual debate were interconnected. The Victorian Age covers developments in social and political theory, economics, science and religion, aesthetics, and sexuality and gender, and provides access to a range of documents which have hitherto been highly inaccessible - both difficult to locate and difficult to interpret and understand. This authoritative anthology contains: * a general introduction which explains the various ways in which the relationships between literary and intellectual culture can be theorised * essays describing the background to the areas of debate illustrated by the selected source documents * bibliographical notes on all the documents included * brief accounts of the reputation and career of the documents' authors. This volume will enable humanities students, as well as the general reader, to understand complex areas of debates in an unusually wide range of disciplines, several of which will be unfamiliar.
The Eighteen Nineties (Print Copy) by
First published in 1913, Holbrook Jackson's The Eighteen Nineties is without doubt the authoritative work on the raffish, scandalous and tempestuous 'Yellow Nineties' of Beardsley, Wilde, Beerbohm and the rest. An exceptional prose stylist, Jackson reviews the awakening of the 1890s before the Great War. The realisation of new possibilities, and the intent to live life more fully and intensely, aroused quite new passions and enthusiasm. He interprets the decade in terms of personalities, arguing that the period has quite a distinct character. It is an extraordinarily self-contained and rich period in the arts and besides individual works of art, its relics are certain moods, attitudes, fantastic anticipations. Jackson synthesises the various movements and relates them to one another, to their foreign influences, and to the main trends of British national art and life.
Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Print Copy) by
Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sicle scrutinises ways in which current conflicts of 'race', class, and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de sicle, 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 New Woman : fiction and feminism at the fin de siecle (Print Copy) by
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 thenew 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 thenineteenth 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.
The Fin de Siècle : a reader in cultural history c.1880-1990 (Print Copy) by
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-siecle years. That historyis 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 andRacial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.
Key Concepts in Victorian Literature (Print Copy) by
Key Concepts in Victorian Literature is a lively, clear and accessible resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature. It contains major facts, ideas and contemporary literary theories, is packed with close and detailed readings and offers an overview of the historical and cultural context in which this literature was produced.
The New Woman in Fiction and Fact (Print Copy) by
A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.
Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu (Print Copy) by
The poems collected in this volume are exquisite and languorous expressions of a spirit of self-indulgence, eroticism and moral rebelliousness that emerged in the late Victorian age. They deal with eternal themes of transition, artifice and, above all, the cruel ravages of time - often depicting flowers, with their heady, perfumed beauty, as the embodiment of decay and desire. Decadent Poetry brings together the works of many fascinating writers - Oscar Wilde on tainted love and the torments of the human spirit, Arthur Symons on an absinthe-induced stupor and the mysteries of the night, Rosamund Marriott Watson on disenchantment and memory, W. B. Yeats on waning passion and faded beauty, Ernest Dowson on lust and despair and Lord Alfred Douglas on shame and secret love, among many others of this exhilarating poetic movement.
Sexual anarchy: gender and culture at the 'fin de siecle' (Print Copy) by 
The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Print Copy) by
This book examines the rise of the femme fatale as a prominant fictional type in late nineteenth-century British culture. As a stereotype she has been 'fabricated', that is to say constructed as a 'figure in the carpet' of the fin-de-siècle. The book argues that Rider Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed , Bram Stoker's female vampires and Conrad's destructive Malayan or African women, even Hardy's Tess , are all caught up in a series of late nineteenth-century contexts: biological determinism, imperialism, race, theories about female sexuality, degeneration and evolutionary theory.
Gendering Orientalism (Print Copy) by
In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism, which analyse Orientalist images of rather than by women, Gendering Orientalism focuses on the contributions of women themselves. Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly nale position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book. By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse. Gendering Orientalism will appeal to students, lecturers and researchers in cultural studies, literature, art history, women's studies and anthropology.
