Horror in the Age of Steam: Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of Transitions

Change is terrifying, and rapid change, within a small amount of time, is destabilizing to any culture. England, under the tutelage of Queen Victoria, witnessed precipitous change the likes of which it had not encountered in generations. Wholesale swaths of the economy and the social structure underwent complete recalibration, through the hands of economic progress, industrial innovation, scientific discovery, and social cohesiveness. Faced with such change, Britons had to redefine the concept of work, belief, and even what it meant to be English. Victorians relied on many methods to attempt to release the steam from the anxieties incurred through change, and one of those methods was the horror story of everyday existence during an age of transition. This book is a study of how authors Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë turned to horrifying representations of everyday reality to illustrate the psychological-traumatic terrors of an age of transition Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of contents Acknowledgments Introduction Terrifyingly Real: Fictional Realism in the Age of Victoria and the Depiction of the Horrors of Everyday Life Notes 1 “If Ever I Saw Horror in the Human Face, It Was Then”: Victorian Horror and the Terrifying Aesthetic of the Taboo in ... Introduction Far, Far Away, In a Castle Darkly: Theories of the Gothic More than Eyeliner and Ripped Pantyhose: The Horrifying Psychological Effects of the Gothic Aesthetic “I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost”: Arriving at the Aesthetics of the Horrific Oozing, Dripping Walls of Blood and Lifeless, Walking Zombies: The True Aesthetics of Horror Fear of the Unknown: Victorian Anxieties and the Leap in the Dark Notes 2 “The Monstrous Serpents of Smoke”: The Hellscape of the Industrial Factory in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton ... Introduction Becoming One with Nature: Environmental Theory and the Horrors of the Natural World The Incessant Belch of Steam: The Nineteenth-Century Task of Industrialization Machines Made of People and People Made of Machines: The Terrifying and Destabilizing Effects of an Industrial Mindset ... Just Another Cog in the Machine: The Victorian Factory Worker and the Horrors of the Factory System Daughter of Smoke and Grime: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Industrial Manchester and the Horrors of the Factory Setting in ... Notes 3 Greeks, Freaks, and Raving Lunatics: The Monstrous World of Science in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights Introduction Questioning Creation: Ideological Doubt and the Turn to Scientific Thinking The Blind Leap into the Laboratory of the World: The Victorian Transition of Scientific Thinking and Confronting the Face ... Revolutions in Thought: A World of Scientific Revolutions and the Destabilizing Effects of Innovation Whither the Ancestor?: The Victorian Search for Answers in an Unstable World What Lies Beneath: The Victorian Pseudo-Sciences and the Monstrous World of the Past Contextualizing the Clay Below: The Historical Aesthetic in Victorian Literature and the Transition to a Scientific Way ... Emily Brontë’s Wild Wild World of Wicked Science Notes 4 Hysterical Angels and Loud-Mouthed Hussies: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the Transformation of Gendered ... Introduction It’s All about the Chromosomes: Gendered Identity and the Strictures of Sexual Control Between Masters and Mistresses: The Gendered Transitions of the Victorian Social World All-Out War: The Battle of the Sexes in the Victorian Age England’s Mad Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling of the Domesticated Prison through Domesticated Entertainment Notes References Index "Faced with scientific innovation and industrial advancement, Victorians sought new ways to deal with their new moment in history. Many turned to artistic movements of the past; there were authors, however, who created new forms of storytelling, the horror story, to illustrate the terrors of an age in transition"-- Provided by publisher