Description: In Victorian England, vulgarity, first used to define language use and class position, became implicated in behavior, material possessions, sexuality, and race. Victorian Vulgarity explores vulgarity's troubled history through dictionaries and grammars; essays, journalism and visual art; and fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope. Neither dismissing nor reveling in vulgarity's myriad temptations, the contributors invite readers to consider the concept's implications for today's writers and artists.
Review Quotes:
'Viva Vulgarity! And especially Victorian Vulgarity, which the editors and contributors clearly show is vulgarity of a most superior kind! This book, with its wide-ranging and eminently readable essays, does an excellent job of showing the centrality - and elusiveness - of definitions of the vulgar to Victorians' understandings of themselves and their culture. This book will be of significant use in the classroom and the scholar's library alike.' Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida, USA
'... all the work in the collection is first-rate. ...Bernstein and Michie did a fine job bringing these essays together and providing them with a thoughtful and polemical frame; the result is an important and wonderfully readable contribution to Victorian cultural studies.' Victorian Studies
'... [Victorian Vulgarity] convincingly shows that the discussion of vulgarity in the nineteenth century is a crucial one even if its main term can be found almost anywhere. The editors are to be commended for assembling an impressive group of essays on an important topic.' Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies
'...the collection's achievement perhaps lies in the fact that readers will likely find these essays to be as useful for their separate commentaries on nineteenth-century subjects as they are for identifying and recasting this particular, if pervasive, consciousness within the Victorians' self-image.' Dickens Quarterly