Description
Book Synopsis As traditional social hierarchies fall away, ever steeper levels of economic inequality and the entrenchment of new class distinctions lend a new glamor to the idea of aristocracy: witness the worldwide popularity of Downton Abbey, or the seemingly insatiable public fascination with the private lives of the British royal family. This collection of new essays investigates the enduring attraction to the icon of the aristocrat and the spectacle of aristocratic society. It traces the ambivalent reactions the aristocracy provokes and the needs (political, ideological, psychological, and otherwise) it caters to in modern times when the economic power of the landed classes have been eroded and their political role curtailed. In this interdisciplinary collection, aristocracy is considered from multiple viewpoints, including British and American literature, European history and politics, cultural studies, linguistics, visual arts, music, and media studies.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Don Giovanni, the "Last Real Aristocrat"
- Château Désir and Beyond: The Young Disraeli and the Politics of Silver-Fork Fiction
- Throwing Down the Gauntlet to "Society": Charles Dickens and John Forster Challenge "Blood"
- A Seeming Anomaly: The British Aristocracy and the Novels of Anthony Trollope
- "Transparent Swindles" and Others: Nineteenth-Century American Views of the English Aristocracy
- Thomas Hardy: Class and Pedigree
- "Un pied sur chaque côté de la Manche": Jacques-Émile Blanche's Pictorial Representation of British Aristocracy
- "Hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners": The Multiple
- Portraits of Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938)
- Capsized Classes: The Aristocracy and the Annihilation of History in D.H. Lawrence's Later Works
- "A twitch upon the thread": Memory, Tradition and Cultural Identity in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited
- Misfits' Portraits: Representations of English Aristocracy in World War I, Through the Interbellum to World War II
- Idealism, Farce and International Heterotopias: Aristocracy in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
- Aristocratic Syntax: Interrogative and Relative Who and Whom in 19th and 20th Century Literature
- Narrative Rhetoric in Representing the British Aristocracy: Julian Fellowes and Peter Morgan
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- About the Contributors
- Index
