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Chargement... Inventing the Victorians (2001)par Matthew Sweet
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  stephengoldenberg | Apr 6, 2016 |   Unfortunately, Sweet is good at research but bad and piecing it together. He lards the text with heaps of anecdotes and snide asides, makes wild assumptions, then contradicts himself only paragraphs later. His logic is faulty at best, and laughably insane at worst. One chapter he maintained that prostitution was not as common as historians think; the very next chapter he talks about how very prevelent prostitution was, and how this proves that Victorians were open minded about sex. He also spends at least 20% of the book talking about current events in a very hack-journalist sort of way: half the chapter on Victoria journalists' use of sex to sell newspapers is actually about Sweet's momentary glimpse of Monica Lewinsky. The chapter closes with a cigar joke. God I hate him. "Although Virginia Woolf claimed to have found her visit to the movies in January 1915 'very boring,' it is doubtful whether she would have found the freedom to cut and splice the chronology of her narratives without the example of the cinematograph." wtf? don't mess with the Woolf. Almost every chapter contains an attempt to chip away at the Bloomsbury group--luckily Sweet sucks, so it's hard to take his nuggets of cruelety and poor logic seriously. Note: According to the British Board of Film Censors, in 1912, the list of 22 reasons for which a film might be cut or censored included "medical operations," indecorous dancing," "native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas," staggering drunkards," or "funerals." (  )1  wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 |  ) J.v.d.A. | Jul 3, 2007 |
 From Library Journal This fun, iconoclastic read from a British journalist and recent Ph.D. shows that stereotypes of Victorian society don't bear scrutiny. Sweet uses Victorian books, periodicals, memoirs, and advice manuals to counter the myths of a strait-laced, repressed, patriarchal, and gloomy culture. Through an analysis of historical pop culture, Victorians are uncovered as progressive, sexually confused, high-tech, sensation-seeking media junkies. Sweet concludes that the Victorians invented "modernity" and reveals various oft-quoted "facts" to be false. Piano legs, for example, were not modestly hidden, nor legs called limbs; and Queen Victoria had no connection with drafting the amendment criminalizing male "indecent acts" the sponsor merely hoped to reduce buggery's penalty. Sweet points out that mainstream pornography at that time depicted men having same-sex couplings as preludes to male-female sex and that one-third of women were in the formal workforce (favored in the then technologically advanced areas of telegraphy and typing). This book can be enjoyed by a wide audience and is essential reading for 19th-century history buffs and professionals. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
Revises and reevaluates the many concepts and images surrounding the Victorians, a society that was responsible for spin-doctoring, lavish publicity stunts, hardcore pornography, theme parks, crime novels, and scandalous journalism.
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins journalist Matthew Sweet's mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. In the words of historian E.P. Thompson, the Victorians have been victims of the "enormous condescension of posterity." Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical, and, worst of all, earnest. Oh, how wrong we are, argues Sweet in this entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great- and great-great-grandparents. On the centenary of Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and the images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the "love that dared not speak its name" declared itself fairly openly. In 1868, the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences. Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own.--Adapted from dust jacket. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)941.081History and Geography Europe British Isles Historical periods of British Isles 1837- Period of Victoria and House of Windsor Victoria 1837-1901Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.54)
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4
This is well-written popular history with a wealth of fascinating anecdotes many of which will be new even to readers who already have some knowledge of the period. Ultimately, the book is a bit too populist to make a thorough enough case for its main premise - that historians often often promulgate the worst and most basic stereotypes of the previous era to make people of the present day feel better about themselves. He entertainingly shows how this will be done for our present new Elizabethan era in the final chapter. (