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Word Crimes by Joss Marsh
Word Crimes by Joss Marsh
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Word Crimes

Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England
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Description

In 1883 the editor of a penny newspaper stood trial three times for the "obsolete" crime of blasphemy. The editor was G. W. Foote, the paper was the Freethinker, and the trial was the defining event of the decade. Foote's "martyrdom" completed blasphemy's nineteenth-century transformation from a religious offense to a class and cultural crime. From extensive archival and literary research, Joss Marsh reconstructs a unified and particular account of blasphemy in Victorian England. Rewriting English history from the bottom up, she tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class "blasphemers," like Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. The new standards of criminality used to judge their "word crimes" rewrote the terms of literary judgment, demoting the Bible to literary masterpiece and raising Literature as the primary standard of Victorian cultural value.
Release date Australia
August 15th, 1998
Author
Audiences
  • Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
  • Professional & Vocational
  • Undergraduate
Pages
362
Dimensions
17x23x3
ISBN-13
9780226506913
Product ID
7118523

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Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900