Researching Bram Stoker's Dracula - CMP102 - Composition 2 - Buscemi - NSCC Library at North Shore Community College

Databases - Best Bets for Researching Bram Stoker's Dracula

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is an excellent source for scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, ebooks and images, covering literature, history, the arts, and more.
World History in Context This link opens in a new window
Find articles, statistics, images, videos, and other types of sources on the most significant people, events and topics in World History.
SNAP!Search: Ebsco Discovery Service This link opens in a new window
In a single search, this tool provides an interdisciplinary approach to your research results. Searches across subject database collections, library locations, and format types.
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Find biographical information about authors, overviews of literary works, literary criticism, and reviews.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference finds context or background information for topics. Interactive Mind Maps identify closely related concepts and keywords associated with a topic.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Written in 1897, the scenes and themes in Dracula capture an array of Victorian norms. You will use the Library's databases to find secondary sources that discuss the story, the author, literary techniques, the historical context of when it was written, or when the story took place.

You could begin by looking for sources that talk about the story itself. Some search terms you could use in the library's databases could be,

Dracula
Bram Stoker
Gothic Literature / Urban Gothic
Travel Narratives

You could research the story's historical context, late Nineteenth Century Britain. Some search terms you could use in the library's databases could be,

Nineteenth-century or Victorian - combined with

Technology / Science / Typewriter
Beliefs / Norms / Culture
Degeneration / Lombroso / Atavism / Darwinian Materialism
Colonialism / Imperialism / Decolonization / Reverse Colonization / Decline of Empire
Gender roles / Women / Sexuality / Purity
Racism / Race / Miscegenation / Superiority
Hysteria / Madness / Psychology

The Victorian Era

The Victorian Era - Overview & Resources
The Victorian Era (1837–1901) refers to Great Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria (1819–1901). Her rule was one of the longest in British history. The Victorian period was one of the heights of British power and culture. Under Victorian rule, the British Empire grew to become one of the largest empires in history.
The Victorian Web
Although the site concentrates on Great Britain in the age of Victoria (1837-1901), it includes much material before and after those years, particularly in sculpture and architecture, and the site also has a good deal of comparative material.

Ebooks on Victorian Culture, Science, and Society

Modern Britain Third Edition by Edward Royle
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781849665308
Publication Date: 2012
This popular work provides an in-depth historical background to issues of contemporary concern, tracing developments over the past two and a half centuries. It promotes accessibility by adopting a thematic approach, with each theme treated chronologically. Major themes are chosen partly by their importance to an understanding of the past and partly by their relevance to students of contemporary Britain - rather than by imposing current fashions in historical study on the past. Thoroughly revised, the third edition of Modern Britain reviews and brings up to date the content to take account of developments since 1997 and reconsiders emphases and interpretations in light of more recent scholarship. It incorporates new currents in historical writing on matters such as the language of class, the position of women, and the revolution worked by the Internet and mobile technologies. Modern Britain is vital reading for students of history and the social and political sciences.
Nineteenth-Century Britain by Christopher Harvie; Colin Matthew; H. C. G. Matthew
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780192853981
Publication Date: 2005
First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable politicalstability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely urban and English. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew show the forces behind Britain's rise to its imperialzenith, and the continuing tensions within the nations and classes of the 'union state'.
Uncertain Victory by James T. Kloppenberg
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780195053043
Publication Date: 1988
Between 1870 and 1920, two generations of European and American intellectuals created a transatlantic community of philosophical and political discourse. Uncertain Victory, the first comparative study of ideas and politics in France, Germany, the U.S., and Great Britain during these fiftyyears, demonstrates how a number of thinkers from different traditions converged to create the theoretical foundations for new programs of social democracy and progressivism. Kloppenberg studies a wide range of pivotal theorists and activists--including philosophers such as William James, WilhelmDilthey, and T. H. Green, democratic socialists such as Jean Jaures, Walter Rauschenbusch, Eduard Bernstein, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and social theorists such as John Dewey and Max Weber--as he establishes the connection between the philosophers' challenges to the traditions of empiricism andidealism and the activists' opposition to the traditions of laissez-faire liberalism and revolutionary socialism. By demonstrating a link between a philosophy of self-conscious uncertainty and a politics of continuing democratic experimentation, and by highlighting previously unrecognizedsimilarities among a number of prominent 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, Uncertain Victory is sure to spur a reassessment of the relationship between ideas and politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hatred and Civility by Christopher Lane
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780231130653
Publication Date: 2006
To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites, murderers, and cheats of all types abound.
Drink and the Victorians by Brian H. Harrison
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781853310461
Publication Date: 1998
This new edition of a pioneering work, first published in 1971, studies the impact of industrialization on drinking habits and attitudes toward drink in England. The book had a major impact on writing about nineteenth-century social history, and continues today to be a much-used resource. This revised edition includes new material and assesses research done since 1971. It also features a fresh introduction which examines the book's place in the understanding of Victorian social history.
The Demography of Victorian England and Wales by Robert Woods
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780521782548
Publication Date: 2000
The Demography of Victorian England and Wales uses the full range of nineteenth-century civil registration material to describe in detail for the first time the changing population history of England and Wales between 1837 and 1914. Its principal focus is the great demographic revolution which occurred during those years, especially the secular decline of fertility and the origins of the modern rise in life expectancy. But Robert Woods also considers the variable quality of the Victorian registration system; the changing role of what Robert Malthus termed the preventive check; variations in occupational mortality and the development of the twentieth-century class mortality gradient; and the effects of urbanisation associated with the significance of distinctive disease environments. The volume also illustrates the fundamental importance of geographical variations between urban and rural areas. This invaluable reference tool is lavishly illustrated with numerous tables, figures and maps, many of which are reproduced in full colour.
Triumph of Order by Lisa Keller
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780231146739
Publication Date: 2010
In an effort to create a secure urban environment in which residents can work, live, and prosper with minimal disruption, New York and London established a network of laws, policing, and municipal government in the nineteenth century aimed at building the confidence of the citizenry and creating stability for economic growth. At the same time, these two world cities attempted to maintain an expansive level of free speech and assembly, concepts deeply ingrained in both national cultures. As democracy expanded in tandem with the size of the cities themselves, the two goals clashed, resulting in tensions over their compatibility. The results of this clash continue to resonate in our society today. Treating nineteenth-century London and New York as case studies, Lisa Keller examines the critical development of sanctioned free speech, controlled public assembly, new urban regulations, and the quelling of riots, all in the name of a proper regard for order. Drawing on rich archival sources that include the unpublished correspondence of government officials and ordinary citizens, Keller paints an intimate portrait of daily life in these two cities and the intricacies of their emerging bureaucracies. She finds that New York eventually settled on a policy of preempting disruption before it occurred, while London chose a path of greater tolerance toward street activities. Dividing her history into five categories--cities, police and militia, the public, free speech and assembly, and the law--Keller concludes with an assessment of freedom in these cities today and asks whether the scales have been tipped too strongly on the side of order and control. Public officials increasingly use permits, fees, and bureaucratic hassles to frustrate the ability of reformers and protesters to make their voices heard, and by doing so, she argues, they strike at the very foundations of democracy.
Inventing Pollution by Peter Thorsheim
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780821416808
Publication Date: 2006
Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

Degeneration

"The Italian anthropologist/criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) - who wrote on the connection between genius and insanity - proposed a theory of criminality in the late 19th century (cf., Lombroso's atavistic theory - the outdated conjecture that some people are more like their distant ancestors than they are to their parents). According to Lombroso's type theory, criminals are throwbacks to prehuman evolution; he considered the physical characteristics of criminals to resemble the characteristics of prehistoric humans. For example, Lombroso argued that people with a receding chin, flattened nose, and low, flat forehead or other features of earlier forms of human life are more likely to be criminals. Lombroso showed that there is a relatively high incidence of these features among persons in jail. According to this approach, criminals are deformed physically and may, therefore, be identified easily. A variation on Lombroso's theory in 1888 is called the degeneracy theory of genius and refers to the overdevelopment of certain capacities or traits that are accompanied by various defects, indicating an instability of organization pointing toward degeneration. In this version, Lombroso suggested the innate disposition to criminal behavior as being associated with degeneration of hereditary cells, and he maintained that most criminals have physical signs (“stigmata of degeneration”) indicating the innate, constitutional disposition to crime. Surprisingly, for a while, the Lombrosian theory was widely accepted, in spite of the fact that there was an equally high incidence of “criminal features” among non-criminal populations as there was among criminal populations."

Source: Lombrosian Theory. (2006). In J. E. Roeckelein (Ed.), Elsevier's dictionary of psychological theories. Elsevier Science & Technology. Credo Reference: http://ezproxynsc.helmlib.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/estpsyctheory/lombrosian_theory/0?institutionId=3627

When researching degeneration, try some of the keywords listed below to locate resources in the Library's databases.

Evolution / Degeneration

Degeneration/degenerate	Social corruption	Hereditary / Hereditary taint
Benedict Morel	Atavism / atavist	Inheritance
Max Nordau	Primitive / savage	Scientific racism
Emile Zola	Deviance / decline	Devolution
Cesare Lombroso	Retrogression	Eugenics
Herbert Spencer	Decay/deterioration	Ethnicity
John Blumenbach	Anthropometry	Social Darwinism

Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain by Lawrence A. Goldman
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780521330534
Publication Date: 2002
This book is a study of the relationships between social thought, social policy and politics in Victorian Britain. Goldman focuses on the activity of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association. For three decades this served as a forum for the discussion of Victorian social questions and as an influential adviser to governments, and its history discloses how social policy was made in these years. The Association, which attracted many powerful contributors, including politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and reformers, had influence over policy and legislation on matters as diverse as public health and women's legal and social emancipation. The SSA reveals the complex roots of social science and sociology buried in the non-academic milieu of nineteenth-century reform. And its influence in the United States and Europe allows for a comparative approach to political and intellectual development in this period.
Labyrinths of Deceit by Richard Walker; Richard J. Walker
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780853238492
Publication Date: 2008
Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong currents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those undercurrents in order to present analternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. VictorianEngland will never look the same.
Neo-Victorian Gothic : Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century by Kohlke, Marie-Luise
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9789042036253
Publication Date: 2012
This volume, the third in Rodopi's Neo-Victorian Series, reassesses neo-Victorianism as a quintessentially Gothic movement. Through their revival of bygone spectres, their obsession with forgotten skeletons in the cupboard, and their exploration of nineteenth-century extremities, neo-Victorian works not only reflect our contemporary Gothic culture but also reactivate it and even enrich it with new variations such as postcolonial, eco or steampunk Gothic. Addressed to scholars and students of both Gothic and Neo-Victorian Studies, this volume will also interest contemporary literature specialists, cultural theorists, and those working on popular historical memory, as it explores the paradox of culture's coincident turn to ethics and sensationalism. As exemplified in its generic variety and hybridity, neo-Victorian Gothic resorts to the spectacularisation of horror while simultaneously demonstrating the hyperreal, textual and self-reflexive nature of these spectacles, just as it resorts to the exploitation of hyperbolic and violent sexuality at the same time as challenging sexual norms and identity politics. In spite of these apparent contradictions, the Gothic forms of neo-Victorianism demonstrate their fundamentally ethical goal of interrogating the uncertain limits between self and other, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, past and present.
Personality and Dangerousness by David McCallum
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780521804028
Publication Date: 2001
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings, Dunblane or the schoolyard killings in America, communities try to come to terms with private and public trauma and there is a need to understand what kind of person can commit such terrible acts. The problem of how to understand dangerousness often centres on the role of the mental health and criminal justice systems and it is from the intersection of these two institutions that the categorisation of dangerous persons has emerged. This 2001 book traces the history of the category of antisocial personality disorder and shows how it is linked to particular kinds of governing. It examines key legal and institutional developments in Australia, the UK and the US and also parallel developments within psychiatry and psychological medicine. Applying a social theoretical analysis to this material, McCallum challenges our assumptions about the formation and control concepts of dangerousness and personality.
The Princeton Guide to Evolution by Jonathan B. Losos (Editor-In-Chief); David A. Baum (Editor); Douglas J. Futuyma (Editor); Hopi E. Hoekstra (Editor); Richard E. Lenski (Editor); Allen J. Moore (Editor); Cahterine L. Peichel (Editor); Dolph Schluter (Editor); Michael C. Whitlock (Editor)
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780691149776
Publication Date: 2013
The Princeton Guide to Evolution is a comprehensive, concise, and authoritative reference to the major subjects and key concepts in evolutionary biology, from genes to mass extinctions. Edited by a distinguished team of evolutionary biologists, with contributions from leading researchers, the guide contains some 100 clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics in seven major areas: phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society. Complete with more than 100 illustrations (including eight pages in color), glossaries of key terms, suggestions for further reading on each topic, and an index, this is an essential volume for undergraduate and graduate students, scientists in related fields, and anyone else with a serious interest in evolution. Explains key topics in some 100 concise and authoritative articles written by a team of leading evolutionary biologists Contains more than 100 illustrations, including eight pages in color Each article includes an outline, glossary, bibliography, and cross-references Covers phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society

National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 by Roberto Romani
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780521810005
Publication Date: 2001
In a work of unusual ambition and rigorous comparison, Roberto Romani considers the concept of 'national character' in the intellectual histories of Britain and France. Perceptions of collective mentalities influenced a variety of political and economic debates, ranging from anti-absolutist polemic in eighteenth-century France to appraisals of socialism in Edwardian Britain. Romani argues that the eighteenth-century notion of 'national character', with its stress on climate and government, evolved into a concern with the virtues of 'public spirit' irrespective of national traits, in parallel with the establishment of representative institutions on the Continent. His discussion of contemporary thinkers includes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Millar, Burke, Constant, de Staël and Tocqueville. After the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of social scientific approaches, including those of Spencer, Hobson and Durkheim, shifted the focus from the qualities required by political liberty to those needed to operate complex social systems, and to bear its psychological pressures.
Bleak Houses by Lisa A. Surridge
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780821416433
Publication Date: 2005
The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat "private" family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Bront#65533;'s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right. Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-si#65533;cle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.
Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780300088724
Publication Date: 2001
Press coverage of the 1888 mutilation murders attributed to Jack the Ripper was of necessity filled with gaps and silences, for the killer remained unknown and Victorian journalists had little experience reporting serial murders and sex crimes. This engrossing book examines how fourteen London newspapers--dailies and weeklies, highbrow and lowbrow--presented the Ripper news, in the process revealing much about the social, political, and sexual anxieties of late Victorian Britain and the role of journalists in reinforcing social norms. L. Perry Curtis surveys the mass newspaper culture of the era, delving into the nature of sensationalism and the conventions of domestic murder news. Analyzing the fourteen newspapers--two of which emanated from the East End, where the murders took place--he shows how journalists played on the fears of readers about law and order by dwelling on lethal violence rather than sex, offering gruesome details about knife injuries but often withholding some of the more intimate details of the pelvic mutilations. He also considers how the Ripper news affected public perceptions of social conditions in Whitechapel.
Industrialization and Society by Eric Hopkins
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780415187770
Publication Date: 2000
Indusrialisation and Societyprovides an essential introduction to the effects of industrialisation on British society, from Queen Victoria's reign to the birth of the welfare state in the 1940s. This book deals with the remarkable social consequences of the industrial revolution, as Britain changed into an urban society based on industry. As the first nation to undergo an industrial revolution, Britain was also the first to deal with the unprecedented social problems of rapid urbanisation combined with an unparalleled growth in population. Industrialisation and Societylooks at contemporary ways in which the government and ordinary people tried to cope with these new pressures, and studies their reactions to the unforseen consequences of the steam revolution. In particular, this indispensable book considers: * the Victorian inheritance * Edwardian England and the Liberal reforms * the two world wars * the Welfare State.
Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society by Thomas Adam (Editor)
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780253343130
Publication Date: 2004
In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society, Thomas Adam has assembled a comparative set of case studies that challenge long-held and little-studied assumptions about the modern development of philanthropy. Histories of philanthropy have often neglected European patterns of giving and the importance of financial patronage to the emergence of modern industrialized societies. It has long been assumed, for example, that Germany never developed civic traditions of philanthropy as in the United States. In truth, however, 19th-century German museums, art galleries, and social housing projects were not only privately founded and supported, they were also blueprints for the creation of similar public institutions in North America. The comparative method of the essays also reveals the extent to which the wealthy classes on both sides of the Atlantic defined themselves through their philanthropic activities. Contributors are Thomas Adam, Maria Benjamin Baader, Karsten Borgmann, Tobias Brinkmann, Brett Fairbairn, Eckhardt Fuchs, David C. Hammack, Dieter Hoffmann, Simone L#65533;ssig, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Susannah Morris.

The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill; Harriet Taylor Mill
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781775410645
Publication Date: 2009
John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay The Subjection of Women argues for equality between the sexes, putting forward ideas that were an affront to many at the time. His wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, is credited with co-authoring the essay. The Subjection of Women puts forward a detailed and passionate opposition to the social and legal inequalities imposed on women by society. Mill saw that he was going against the grain of the time, but argued that such inequality was a past relic...
From Bondage to Contract by Amy Dru Stanley
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780521635264
Publication Date: 1998
In the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater power than that of contract. The antislavery claim was that the negation of chattel status lay in the contracts of wage labor and marriage. Signifying self-ownership, volition, and reciprocal exchange among formally equal individuals, contract became the dominant metaphor for social relations and the very symbol of freedom. This 1999 book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not.
Sexual Science by Cynthia Eagle Russett
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780674043022
Publication Date: 2009
One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with savages and idiots, an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly. At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner No other work has treated this provocative topic so completely, nor have the various scientific theories used to marshal evidence of women's inferiority been so thoroughly delineated and debunked. Erudite enough for scholars in the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of women, this book with its stylish presentation will also attract a large nonspecialist audience.
Uneven Developments by Mary Poovey
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780226675312
Publication Date: 2009
Mary Poovey''s "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer" has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In "Uneven Developments" Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutionsOComedical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sourcesOCoparliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticityOCoPoovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. "Uneven Developments" is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women''s issues from economic and political histories."
Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781441131683
Publication Date: 2012
This volume seeks to address the questions of poverty, charity, and public welfare, taking the nineteenth-century London Foundling Hospital as its focus. It delineates the social rules that constructed the gendered world of the Victorian age, and uses 'respectability' as a factor for analysis: the women who successfully petitioned the Foundling Hospital for admission of their infants were not East End prostitutes, but rather unmarried women, often domestic servants, determined to maintain social respectability. The administrators of the Foundling Hospital reviewed over two hundred petitions annually; deliberated on about one hundred cases; and accepted not more than 25 per cent of all cases. Using primary material from the Foundling Hospital's extensive archives, this study moves methodically from the broad social and geographical context of London and the Foundling Hospital itself, to the micro-historical case data of individual mothers and infants.