Search results for ""Author Deborah Lutz""

The story of the Brontës is told through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on and inscribed at the parsonage in Haworth. From Charlotte’s writing desk and the manuscripts it contained to the brass collar worn by Emily’s dog, Keeper, each object opens a window onto the sisters’ world, their fiction and the Victorian era. By unfolding the histories of the things they used, the chapters form a chronological biography of the family. A walking stick evokes Emily’s solitary hikes on the moors and the stormy heath—itself a character in Wuthering Heights. Charlotte’s bracelet containing Anne and Emily’s intertwined hair gives voice to her grief over their deaths. These possessions pull us into their daily lives: the imaginary kingdoms of their childhood writing, their time as governesses and their stubborn efforts to make a mark on the world.

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At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day. As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet. In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.

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"For the classroom and for the general reader, there’s no better way to experience the context in which Jane Eyre was written, illuminating modern commentary, and the novel itself in an authoritative text.” Fred kaplan, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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This Norton Critical Edition includes: The first British edition of the novel, published in 1886 by Longmans, Green, and Co., the only edition set directly from Stevenson’s manuscript and for which he read and corrected proofs. Deborah Lutz’s thorough introduction and detailed explanatory footnotes to the novel. Seven illustrations. A rich and relevant selection of background materials centered on the novel’s composition, reception, and historical and cultural contexts, alongside seven of Stevenson’s letters. Interpretative essays by Elaine Showalter, Jack Halberstam, Martin Danahay and Stephen Arata. A chronology and a selected bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

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About Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: “It is as if [Brontë] could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.” —Virginia Woolf

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