Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play

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Mike Huggins, J. A. Mangan
Psychology Press, 2004 - 246 páginas

Many historians have claimed that respectability was the sharpest line of social division in Victorian society, even that the line between the 'respectable' and 'unrespectable' was more significant than between rich and poor. This irreverent and revisionist collection argues that they have over-polarised Victorian attitudes and challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach.
Disreputable Pleasures explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male sporting pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such value as manliness, muscularity and machismo, or sensuality, virility and hedonism. It sheds light on the ways in which the public rhetoric of Victorian respectability could be rendered problematic by the practical pursuit of private pleasures. It shows that Victorian leisure was much more contested cultural space than has been recognised, a battleground whose contestants ranged from the rational recreationalist to the avowedly hedonistic, and from the sacred to the profane.
Disreputable Pleasures poses a powerful challenge to the accepted public image of Victorian society and will greatly add to our present understanding of Victorian Britain.

 

Contenido

great days and jolly days
3
some aspects of late Victorian
35
the Liverpudlian middle classes and 57
57
Popular Sunday newspapers respectability and workingclass
83
lowlife womeninperil and
103
a satirical sociology
124
A heart of darkness? Leisure respectability and the aesthetics of
153
Violence gamesmanship and the amateur ideal in Victorian
172
homosocial behaviour in 125
185
The dogs bark but the caravan moves
204
Notes
211
Select bibliography
235
Index
241
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