The Spectacle of Intimacy (ebook)

Argumento de The Spectacle of Intimacy (ebook)

"A major, often dazzling work of fascinating implications and interest. Scholars of such diverse subjects as Dickens, Tennyson, Victorian sensation fiction, the Divorce Bill of the 1850s, Lord Melbourne, Victorian feminism, the history of sexual scandal, or changing ideas of Empire will want and need to consult this book. Students of epistemes, eras, and broad cultural phenomena will also have to reckon with it. Written with clarity and wit, The Spectacle of Intimacy is a pleasure as well as an intellectual boon to read."--Robert M. Polhemus, Stanford University

"The Spectacle of Intimacy offers wonderfully intelligent and vivacious literary and cultural analyses of domesticity in Victorian Britain. It approaches its subject through a broad array of sources and engages those materials with great canniness, cogency, subtlety, and wit. Any reader interested in Victorian Britain will want to read this book."--James Eli Adams, Indiana University

"An important study. This is a major work in Victorian and nineteenth-century scholarship. It functions both as a synthesis of cultural material and as an analysis of particular subjects. It is also a pleasure to read and a scholarly and intellectual boon to read clear, lucid, witty, and expert prose by Chase and Levenson, it has point, simplicity, and elegance."--Robert Polhemus, Novel: A Forum on Fiction

"In readings that diplomatically maintain alliances among literature, politics, the law and social history, Chase and Levenson disclose a complex economy of public and private that transversed Victorian life. No separate spheres here; this is first-rate interdisciplinary scholarship."--Sarah Churchwell, Times Literary Supplement

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 20000List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
INTRODUCTION The Trouble with Families 3
PART ONE: The Political Theater of Domesticity
CHAPTER ONE The Trials of Caroline Norton: Poetry, Publicity, and the Prime Minister 21
CHAPTER TWO: The Young Queen and the Parliamentary Bedchamber: "I never saw a man so frightened" 46
PART Two: Beneath the Banner of Home t
CHAPTER THREE Sarah Stickney Ellis: The Ardent Woman and the Abject Wife 65
CHAPTER FOUR Tom's Pinch: The Sexual Serpent beside the Dickensian Fireside 86
PART THREE: Was That an Angel in the House?
CHAPTER FIVE Love after Death: The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill 105
CHAPTER SIX The Transvestite, the Bloomer, and the Nightingale 121
PART FOUR: The Architecture of Comfort and Ruin
CHAPTER SEVEN On the Parapets of Privacy: Walls of Wealth and Dispossession 143
CHAPTER EIGHT Robert Kerr: The Gentleman's House and the One-Room Solution 156
PART FIVE: The Sensations of Respectability
CHAPTER NINE The Empire of Divorce: Single Women, the Bill of 1857, and Revolt in India
CHAPTER TEN Bigamy and Modernity: The Case of Mary Elizabeth Braddon 201
EPILOGUE: Between Manual and Spectacle 215
Notes 221
Index 247