Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...return to the Okeefenokee (sic) Wildlife Refuge in Georgia; although don't get too disappointed, because Charlie is being replaced by another baby North American alligator named Herman. Veh. This month, you can go see "The Revolution" in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., or "Victorian Boston" in the Castle on Arlington St. near Park Square between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Gee whiz. If you're really into the bicentennial, and haven't had enough American history from reading the backs of your sugar packets, you can start getting ready for the bicentennial Halloween Ball...
...shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel - the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting. Even the baggiest literary shapes require a greater certainty about life than heroine - or author - can muster. "It did make a mess...
What finally prevents Gator from rising above its humble origins is an awkward mixture of moods that Director Reynolds never really manages to sort out and smooth over. The picture's basic ambience is rather larkish, but there are melodramatic sequences of near-Victorian sentimentality (especially in an exploration of a cathouse specializing in drugged adolescents) and others that stress a kind of Disposall-style violence. These sudden shifts in tone are disorienting and make what might have been a modestly entertaining venture into something that is unfortunately less than the sum of its several good parts...
...Fashion," said Baudelaire, "is a sublime distortion of nature, or rather a constantly repeated attempt to reform nature." It also can be a means of understanding civilizations. The fortress of Victorian dress suggested much about the surrounding world's customs. So did the loose, low-cut flapper lines of the '20s, the Doris Day suburban look of the '50s and, in the '60s, the brash, youthful miniskirts, which gave way to pantsuits and jeans...
...were turbaned, feathered, booted, shawled, cinched, tasseled and encrusted from head to foot in braid, beads, rickrack and passementerie. The so-called Fantasy Look, which seemed more suitable for grand opera than for real life, was a melange of styles derived from the Russian, Gypsy, Cossack, Moroccan, Indian and Victorian...