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Victorian Christmas Books
Tara Moore
其他書名
A Seasonal Reading Phenomenon
出版University of Delaware, 2006
ISBN05427247319780542724732
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=r9SMAQAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋Looking beyond Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol allows for a wider understanding of the mid-nineteenth-century Christmas reading experience. My dissertation explains the popularity of seasonal books within the context of family structures which were being jeopardized by emigration and commercialization. Authors such as John Ruskin, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Catherine Gore, William M. Thackeray, Benjamin Farjeon, and Henry Mayhew took part in the lucrative Christmas book market which depended on the desire to enshrine middle-class ideology within the cultural climax of Christmas. Focal texts in this study include reviews by Thackeray as well as Dickens's The Battle of Life, Gaskell's The Moorland Cottage, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Christmas Hirelings. Christmas books repeatedly supply a Christmas utopia, a fantasy version of a strong English national home. Seasonal utopia narratives retract the male emigrant from foreign lands and bring about cathartic conclusions that meet the high emotional expectations of the midwinter reading audience. Christmas books instructed the English readership in a myth of national identity, especially through the growing expectations of Christmas food rituals. This audience-study depends upon archival evidence to argue that Christmas book buyers performed reading habits such as idealized reading circles and tearful encounters with the narratives as a way of participating in the growing national trend of Christmas. Like the holiday films that cheer the modern American Christmas, Victorian Christmas books supplied a festive fantasy for an audience with concerns about the continuance of their kinship groups and the development of their national identity.