During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functio
This original and provocative 2001 study discusses the work of a number of authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to argue that mainstream society was enabled to accept the non-normative sexuality of the Aesthetic Movement chiefly through parody and self-parody. Highlighting Victorian popular culture, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds an important dimension to the theorisations of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics.
To demonstrate the variety and ingenuity of Victorian short stories, Denisoff (English, communication and culture, Ryerson U.) has collected 26 examples from famous and unknown 19th century writers. T
First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O'Ferrall and her mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of that period alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular for years,
When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was "not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a
