New Perspectives in British Cultural History

Description

This book is composed of a selection of papers presented at a conference in Cambridge in December 2005. Cultural history is a relatively new sub-discipline. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly apparent that a new generation of historians has emerged. These scholars have become concerned with research, sources and questions traditionally beyond the scope of the discipline of history. Indeed, recent monographs in history have demonstrated a growing awareness of the cultural imagination in analyses of patterns of change and continuity in the past. Such a movement has also encouraged the development of new networks between different disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences. The authors of these chapters come from a wide range of academic backgrounds. While all are concerned with crucial issues of the past, they represent a substantial variety of disciplines. In addition to the historians are those trained and working in literary studies, art history, design, music and science. As early-career scholars, the research they present is cutting edge: these contributions represent the very latest trends in cultural studies and demonstrate the attempts of new researchers to answer the most current and challenging questions that are being proposed in this field. Table of Contents List of Illustrations Introduction • Rosalind Crone and David Gange Part I: Place 1. The View from the Viaduct: The Impact of Railways upon Images of English Provincial Towns, 1830-1857 • Katy Jones 2. Reading the Cityscape: Dublin’s Churches, 1670-1720 • Robin Usher 3. “Of Yetis and Men”: Representations of Tibet and the Himalayas, c.1929-1953 • Tom Neuhaus 4. Marvels in the Desert: Pyramids and Pyramidography in Early-Modern England • Angus Vine Part II: Religion 5. A Protestant Hero: Religious Aspects of Oliver Cromwell’s Victorian Reputation • Bertram Troeger 6. Religious Reformation and National Unity: British Protestants and Italy, 1860-1870 • Danilo Raponi 7. Reason versus Revelation? The Evangelical Apologetic of Thomas Rawson Birks • Gareth Atkins Part III: Consumer Cultures 8. Civilising Sucking: The Production of Ceramic Infant Feeding Devices in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries • Annabella Pollen 9. Between Representations and Practices: Commercial Advertising and British Home Front Culture during the Second World War • David Clampin Part IV: Modernity, Science and Re-Enchantment 10. Illuminated by Darkness: Superstition, The Supernatural and the Challenges of Modernity, c.1800-1870 • Karl Bell 11. Paganism, Magic and Mystery Religion in Late-Victorian England • Jennifer Hallett 12. Religion and Science in Late-Nineteenth Century Egyptology • David Gange 13. Astronomical Language in the Republican Writing of James Harrington • Antti Tahvanainen 14. Perceptions of Natural Events as an Approach to Cultural History • Chris Smyth Part V: Text 15. Lives and Letters: Correspondence and Public Characteri n the Nineteenth Century • Paul White 16. Cries of Murder and Sounds of Bloodshed: The Practice of Reading Cheap Fiction in Working-Class Communities in Early-Victorian London • Rosalind Crone 17. French Novels in Mid-Victorian England • Michael Ledger-Lomas Part VI: Music 18. Auden’s “Imaginary Song” • George Corbett 19. Reading Post-War Britain in Lennon and McCartney’s Imagined Communities • James McGrath 20. Must the Hacienda be Built? • Liz Naylor 21. The Kinks, or a Redefinition of English National Identity • Matthew Prichard Contributors Index