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10 Jun 2021 14:18:34 UTC
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41201
Author: Boyd Hilton
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In a period scarred by apprehensions of revolution, war, invasion, poverty, and disease, elite members of society lived in constant fear of what they thought of as the mad, bad, and dangerous people. Boyd Hilton examines the changes in politics and society in the years 1783-1846, and how the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as Victorianism. - This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the worlds strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the first industrial revolution. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of war to the death against Napoleonic France. But if Britains external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The countrys population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading evangelicalism. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as Victorianism. - A scrupulously complete analysis of political and social change. - Charles Saumarez Smith, The Sunday TelegraphHistory writing at its most compelling. - Adam Phillips, The ObserverThe range, richness and complexity of Boyd Hiltons text are impossible to convey in summary, and hard fully to appreciate in a single reading. A mastery of the voluminous literature is complimented by an acquaintance with the sources which produce a wealth of illuminating quotation to catch the tones and inflections of the age...The analysis it offers, and the proportions and emphases which it adopts, will galvanize debate for years to come, and make it a contribution to history such as a safer survey, less ambitious in design, enterprising in argument, and integrative in technique, could not be. - Paul Smith, The Times Literary SupplementThe main narrative is interspersed with fascinating essays on science, religion, art, architecture and literature - a generous helping for the many people who will read this book for pleasure rather than profit. - Ben Wilson, The SpectatorBoyd Hilton has produced a tour de force that will stimulate interest in and guide understanding of the period for years to come. - Peter Borsay, BBC History MagazineA lively and wide-ranging study...[a] comprehensive, intriguing and challenging volume that has proved well worth the wait. - Tristram Hunt, New StatesmanThis book, like its companion volumes, takes for its subject English society as a whole, and the Byronic nudge of the title, as well as promising entertainment, is meant to alert us to the idea that the years before the Victorian Reform Acts were ones of violence, apprehension and 18th century debauchery. - David Horspool, The Guardian
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1 year ago
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31234
Author: Mark Dery
File Type: epub
A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit (The New York Times Book Review). From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists modern life seems to have become a pyrotechnic insanitarium, Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxietya combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes. Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name. Wired**From Publishers WeeklyCentering his critique of the contemporary pop cultural landscape around the title image, borrowed from a sobriquet once applied to Coney Island, Dery sees a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where cartoon and nightmare melt into one. He can be an astute observer of trends, adept at connecting seemingly disparate phenomena. The best essays here focus on our obsessions with conspiracy and paranoia, the new grotesque aesthetic in the arts and the changing dynamics of technophilia and technophobia in the new computer age. Unfortunately, the book is padded with writing on minor topics. Dery shifts focus rather too quickly?one has the sense that he is throwing ideas at a wall ostensibly to see what sticks, but really hoping to distract attention from the results through the speed of his performance. And, too often, he filters his subject matter through suppositions plucked from high theory without examining the ideas hes borrowing, perhaps least successfully in his deployment of Georges Bataille to unravel the cultural import of Jim Carrey. Some inconsistencies stick out at one point, he characterizes deconstruction as a vogue, barely above the level of a conspiracy theory at another, he concludes his analysis of freaks as culturally other with one of the hoariest of deconstructionist chestnuts, the condemnation of binary oppositions. Such jargon limits his writing, and makes the book feel dated, as his reliance on interpretive strategies left over from the 70s (particularly from French thought Kristevas abject, Baudrillards postmodern, Deleuze and Guattaris schizophrenic) is stale even by the standards of academe. 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Like many essays on pop culture of contemporary America, Derys collection is an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink view of the end of the millenium (including comparisons of the Warren Report to Finnegans Wake, and the authors fascination with the Edvard Munch painting The Scream). Occasionally, Derys ruminations on our Nike-obsessed, Jim Carrey-imitating, X-Files-paranoid culture are hilarious at other times, they definitely are not. But his point is well taken, that as we approach the next century, the U.S. is more of a culturally aware, and thus more culturally consuming, country than ever before. The authors previous take on cyberspace, Escape Velocity, seeps in here as well the information age pushes the bits and pieces of pop culture further in our faces every day. The title is an old term used to promote New Yorks Coney Island amusement park, and a more appropriate monicker for 1990s culture cant be found. With no war to distract us as in previous decades, the culture itself has become a focal point for societal anxiety, and Derys insights into the whys of this upheaval are most illuminating. Joe Collins
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1 year ago
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application/epub+zip
English