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 | | Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture by Kali Israel ISBN-10: 9780195122756 ISBN-10: 0-19-512275-5 ISBN-13: 9780195122756 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-512275-6 Hardcover 1998-12-31 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Amazon.com Kali Israel offers much more than a traditional biography of an eccentric Victorian in Names and Stories. Instead, Israel, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, uses her subject--art historian, writer, and socialite Emilia Dilke--as the focus of a well-researched analysis of 19th-century Britain. Israel examines the stories by which Emilia Dilke is made known to us today, and how those create, contain, extend, and multiply the subject. Forgoing the traditional historian's tendency to sort through texts--judging them as more or less truthful reflections of a "real," retrievable person--she critically examines the texts themselves, and in relationship to each other, then uses them to delineate multiple representations of Dilke. Each of her seven chapters focuses on a particular period of Dilke's history. There are stories about families that circulate around Dilke's childhood, stories about her making (and being made into) pictures, about both her marriages, and about her life at Oxford. Israel also offers compelling readings of Dilke's own texts about sex in marriage and the "adulterous" texts and tales by and about Dilke and each of her two husbands. Although frequently academic, Israel's prose remains tightly focused around her subject, and her argument unfolds logically. Names and Stories offers an insightful examination of the relations and contradictions of diverse political, intellectual, social and aesthetic histories of Victorian England. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack | ||
Product Description "Emilia Dilke" (1840-1904) was christened Emily Francis Strong and known by her middle name throughout her childhood as the daughter of an army officer-cum-bank manager in Iffley, England, near Oxford, and her days as an art student in London. During her first marriage, she was Francis Pattison or Mrs. Mark Pattison, while her published works of art history and criticism were neutrally signed E. F. S. Pattison. Later, in the 1870s, she privately changed her first name to Emilia, a switch made public when she remarried in 1885. By this second nuptial union she became Lady Dilke, the famous intellectual, feminist, art critic, author, and, eventually, the active and popular President of the Women's Trade Union League for nearly twenty years. A rich work of biography, literary criticism, aesthetic history, and sociocultural inquiry, Names and Stories traces the life of this fascinating and remarkable woman as it was lived under many different appellations and guises. In doing so, the book investigates the full spectrum of nineteenth-century British thought and custom. By studying not only an individual life but the many stories that informed, determined, and challenged that life, author Kali Israel considers Dilke as both subject and object--author and character, player and pawn--in the Victorian world of which she was a part. As they are chronicled, explained, and contextualized in this book, these stories--however they were created, told, or interpreted--move through realms both historical and fictional. Israel's central character experienced not one but two highly visible marriages marked by rampant gossip, high-profile sex scandals, and inconclusive courtroom battles; was considered by some to be the model for the character of Dorothea in Eliot's Middlemarch; and similarly "appeared" in many other novels, plays, and even poems in her own time and up through the mid-twentieth century. Names and Stories is not a conventional "life and times" book, even though it recounts a birth-to-death adventure that is both unique and epochal. Rather, the work utilizes Dilke's myriad narratives as the means to broader critical, historical, and theoretical engagements. Debating the very nature of life-study and biography-writing, Israel employs a wide array of published and primary sources to argue that the "names and stories" of Emilia Dilke can help us understand key conflicts and tensions within Victorian Britain, as well as ongoing cultural arguments. This book thus examines several nineteenth-century pressure-points in this light, among them gender, representation, authority, authorship, knowledge, and political thought. Israel's contemporary and cross-disciplinary study also illuminates such broader themes as the family, the body, narrative, figuration, and historical writing and reading. | ||