Author: Julie-Marie Strange File Type: pdf A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Based on working-class autobiography, the book challenges dominant assumptions about absent or feckless fathers, and reintegrates the paternal figure within the emotional life of families. Locating autobiography within broader social and cultural commentary, Julie-Marie Strange considers material culture, everyday practice, obligation, duty and comedy as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives. Emphasising the importance of separating men as husbands from men as fathers, Strange explores how emotional ties were formed between fathers and their children, the models of fatherhood available to working-class men, and the ways in which fathers interacted with children inside and outside the home. She explodes the myth that working-class interiorities are inaccessible or unrecoverable, and locates life stories in the context of other sources, including social surveys, visual culture and popular fiction. **Review This book is a major contribution to family history and British social history, which will be valued not only for its substantive findings, but for setting new standards in the interpretation of working-class autobiographies. The experience of fatherhood is brought vividly to life, in writing which is lucid and stylish. John Tosh, University of Roehampton In this brilliant study Strange restores humanity to Victorian and Edwardian working-class fathers. She rightly argues that the social history of the family cannot adequately be told if fathers and fatherhood remain an absent presence. Through a sensitive, multi-layered reading of autobiographical accounts, Strange convincingly demonstrates that intimate histories of private life can be simultaneously poetic and political. A stunning achievement. Jon Lawrence, University of Cambridge Julie-Marie Strange provides a long-overdue counter narrative (as she calls it) to the standard story of the working-class father as failed provider for wife and children. Focusing on the childs response to the intimacies of home life, this innovative study uncovers a wealth of new material which offers a much warmer, richer, and more personal understanding of the way fathers invested meaning - even laughter and comedy - in their everyday interactions with their families. Valerie Sanders, University of Hull Julie-Marie Strange gives us a dynamic, contextual portrait of working-class fathers, through their own eyes and those of their children, which refuses all easy cliches about their parenting. Instead, Strange focuses on what gave fatherhood meaning - both having, and being, a father, across the early twentieth century. She is deeply attentive to, and respectful of, the mundane acts of care, material provision and ritual which make up the affective world of fatherhood. Never sentimental, Strange nonetheless re-enchants working-class fatherhood. [This book] provides a brilliant example of how both the history of emotions and of material culture might inform social history, and powerfully change the existing historical narrative. Lucy Delap, Kings College London Dr Julie-Marie Strange ... scoured hundreds of contemporary souces - ranging from memoirs to music hall comedy lyrics - to test the traditional caricature of fathers in the 19th and early 20th Century as strict, lacking affection and often brutal. John Bingham, The Daily Telegraph The purpose of this delightful book is to both reassess and expand understanding of plebeian masculinity. The author reveals just how fathers and their children could and did create, experience, and sometimes even enjoy their own forms, sites, and languages of affective relationships. The careful exegesis of working-class autobiographies presented here allows readers to both broaden and deepen their understanding and appreciation not only of working-class fathers, in particular, but also of the British working-class family more generally. A most welcome contribution to the literature. Choice This is a very impressive work of social history, characterized by a tremendous emotional intelligence that allows Strange to imbue the actors she discusses with real humanity in a few deft strokes. Ben Griffin, The Journal of Modern History Excellent. ... Stranges nuanced analysis of the emotional intracies of fathering ensures that fathers will certainly be actors in future feminist histories of families. Ellen Ross, History Workshop Journal Book Description A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Julie-Marie Strange considers comedy, material culture, everyday practice, obligation and duty as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives, and the involvement between fathers and children.

Author: Gail Fincham File Type: pdf This book explores the varied ways in which modernist and postcolonial innovations in fiction are motivated by crises and revolutions in the human perception and appropriation of space. Space for the writers concerned has its political, historical, cultural and gender dimensions as well as its geographical identity.ReviewThis is a very well considered essay collection that includes some experienced and highly able scholars. The essays in the volume are original, cross-cultural in content, and make a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of geographies in literature. -- Linda Dryden, Reader in Literature and Culture, Napier University, UK This in-depth and carefully argued collection of essays...has a strong cross-cultural premise that emphasizes the significant ways in which the experience and depiction of space and place in modernist and postcolonial literary texts overlap. - Susan Smit-Marais, PYP Online About the AuthorATTIE DE LANGE is Professor of English and Director of the Research Unit Languages and Literature in the South African Context,Potchefstroom Campus, North-West University, South Africa. GAIL FINCHAM is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English,University of Cape Town, South Africa.JEREMY HAWTHORN is Professor of Modern British Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.JAKOB LOTHE is Professor of English Literature, University of Oslo, Norway.