Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...admit for years. The authors blend statistics on everything from the percentage of blacks in skilled plantation trades to the average age of black mothers at the time of their first-born child. The result is a vision of plantations as businesses administered in ways that suggest both a Victorian family and a paternalistic corporation eager to encourage worker morale in the interest of higher profits. Slaves, the book says, did almost all the skilled work of the plantations and most of the overseeing. In some cities, more than 25% of adult male slaves were skilled artisans, and when they...
...fairy tale allied itself with other types of mass culture that saved it from cuteness and trite morality throughout the Victorian era. It never joined forces with another persistent and repressed literary genre, pornography--which this book terms "the ultimate cultural ghetto"--but it did identify with "vulgar" elements like spiritual mediums, Nursery nonsense and thrillers...
...chimeric nature of fantasy threatened the conventional, socialized scheme of life, and Victorian fairy stories flourished only briefly. Opposition to the literature came from organs like the utilitarian Westminster Review, which warned...
...genre never faded permanently. As Cott points out, rock musicians, like Donovan, dabble in variations of fairy lore; professors, like Tolkein, study the Silent Moving Ones; and Victorian imagination persists in the social and political satire of "The Wind in the Willows" or "The Wizard of Oz." Susan Sontag relates that the North Vietnamese Women's Union rehabilitated thousands of prostitutes after the liberation of Hanoi from France in 1954 by telling them fairy stories and encouraging children's games. "That," a spokesman explained, "was to restore their innocence and give them faith again in man. You see, they...
Cott includes an almost intimidating photograph of George Macdonald, one of the most influential of Victorian writers. He has an imposing, theatrical head--with staring eyes, straight nose, and a massive white beard--a black cassock is draped over his shoulders and bound with rope at the waist. Macdonald wrote allegorical, spiritual fantasy in a language that can only be described as lyric and dignified. Archetypes people his tales--like Photogen, the "day boy" and Nycteris, the "night girl" whom a witch raised on "wine dark as a carbuncle, and pomegranates, and purple grapes, and birds that dwell in marshy...