Monika Pietrzak Franger Livres

This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture. 

Today, the majority of people worldwide live in cities or metropolitan areas. This volume responds with a transdisciplinary approach to growing urbanisation and globalisation – climate change, energy change, secure jobs, affordable living, sustainable mobility, migration or demographic change. It brings together recent research in the areas of Urban and Media Studies, 19th- and 20th-century urban fiction and Victorian and neo-Victorian Studies. The contributors endeavor to compare various discourses of urban transformation – expansion, corruption, renewal, dereliction, adaptation – that have emerged in situations of rapid, uncontrolled change. Fields covered include the London Green Belt and ecocritical flânerie in New York, neo-Victorian streetwalking in novels by Peter Ackroyd and Michel Faber, the global impact of urban transformations on Dublin or Hong Kong, ‘slumming’ in the TV series ‘Maison Close’, ‘Ripper Street’ and ‘Penny Dreadful’ as well as Amsterdam’s Red Light District and urban geographies of entertainment in London, from the Crystal Palace to the Millennium Dome.

Male subjectivity and gender identity have traditionally been seen as constructed through exclusion, with any disruption of body boundaries viewed as a threat to conventional masculinity. While such disruptions can be subversive, their potential for radical change is not guaranteed. Not every boundary violation leads to a new understanding of the body, nor does the re-establishment of boundaries imply a shift in the conceptualization of gender identity. This study explores how British male artists in the 1990s engaged with bodily boundaries and the associated binaries. It identifies three key trends in the representation of the male body: the preservation of bodily boundaries, the dissolution of traditional binaries linked to these boundaries, and the penetration of bodily structures. The inquiry assesses whether these trends have led to a revised model of male subjectivity or if, despite innovative approaches to bodily forms, artists have continued to uphold the traditional view of male identity as defined by opposition. The discussion incorporates various media from the 1990s, including films like Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, as well as dance, theatre, and performance art by figures such as DV8 and Douglas Gordon.