Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Series Editor’s Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria's Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the socalled Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century.
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half-century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Pre-Raphaelites and OrientalismLanguage and Cognition in Remediations of the East, pp. vii - viiiPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018