Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Name: Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England
Brand: Hart Publishing
SKU: 9781509904983
Price: 315.12 HKD
Availability: InStock
Author: Ian Ward
ISBN: 9781509904983

By Ian Ward

Hart Publishing November 2015

Specifications

ISBN-13: 9781509904983
Publisher: Hart Publishing
Publication: November 2015
Format: Paperback , 160 pages
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

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The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

Introduction: Dark Shapes; Angels in the House; At Home with the Dombeys; The Disease of Reading; Pleasing and Teaching; 1.
Criminal Conversations: One Person in Law; Newcome v Lord Highgate; Carlyle v Carlyle; Oh Reader!; 2.
Fashionable Crimes: The Sensational Moment; Fashionable Crimes; Mrs Mellish's Marriages; The Shame of Miss Braddon; 3.
Unnatural Mothers: The Precious Quality of Truthfulness; Hardwicke's Children; R v Sorrel; The Lost and the Saved; 4.
Fallen Angels: Walking the Streets; The Murder of Nancy Sikes; Contemplating Jenny; Because Men Made the Laws

About the Author

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, and the author of a number of books on law, literature and history including 'Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives' (Cambridge UP, 1995), 'Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination' (Cambridge UP, 1999), The English Constitution: Myths and Realities' (Hart, 2004), 'Law, Text, Terror' (Cambridge UP, 2009) and most recently 'Law and the Brontes' (Palgrave, 2011).

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