Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain by J. Jeffrey Franklin

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 220-222
Author(s):  
Aren Roukema
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Crisis Of Faith ◽  
Alternative Religions

The Victorian Context

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Bevir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Crisis Of Faith ◽  
Socialist Movement

This chapter explores Victorian culture using the concepts of tradition and dilemma to highlight both continuities and discontinuities. Continuities arose from the persistence of traditions from the late eighteenth century right through the late nineteenth century. Discontinuities arose as people responded to dilemmas in ways that transformed these traditions. More specifically, the dominant traditions in Victorian Britain were liberalism and evangelicalism, both of which had constitutive places in a wide range of domestic, social, political, and imperial practices. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, these two traditions confronted dilemmas such as the collapse of classical economics and the crisis of faith. People responded to these dilemmas in ways that decisively changed social practices, altering the manner of religious worship, inspiring a new trade unionism, and fragmenting the Liberal Party. The British socialist movement developed in the context of these changes, sometimes benefiting from them, sometimes contributing to them, and at other times struggling to respond to them.

A Christmas Carol: Disability Conceptualised through Empathy and the Philosophy of ‘Technologically Useful Bodies’

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Ester Vidović
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Linguistic Approach

The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.

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