Variety Of Transgressions Research Articles

Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari

Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. ix, 284 pp. $105.00 US (cloth). This collection is a very welcome addition to the recent spate of publications on leisure in communist eastern Europe. The volume's ten chapters provide broad chronological, geographic, and topical coverage. Some contributions are absolutely excellent, and others are very good. Following Alexander Vari's detailed introduction, the chapters are grouped into five, not always useful, sub-categories: Concert Halls and Estate Museums, Cabins in the Woods, Beach Parties, Roadside Adventures and Bright City Lights, and Sports and Stadia. Cathleen M. Giustino's conclusion helpfully ties the chapters together. Among the themes the authors address are productive leisure, the socialist escapes of the title, and a variety of transgressions, including nudism and political jokes. Cathleen Giustino's, Patrice Dabrowski's, and Mary Neuberger's contributions are among the most conceptually anchored and best argued of the chapters. They address the socialist states' attempts to build support for their respective regimes by providing their citizens a variety of leisure pursuits: The Czechoslovak state sought to build support for the regime through controlling public perception of newly nationalized castles and chateaux in the late- and post-Stalinist era--the popular depiction of the Bieszczady Mountains in southeastern Poland as the Wild West, and the malleable parameters of socialist leisure in socialist Bulgaria began in the late 1950s. Giustino analyzes aristocratic residences the state had seized and transformed into state-owned museums to demonstrate how Czechoslovaks were able to produce meaning in their lives independent of party intentions. She argues that the state's inability to influence visitors owed to its inconsistent employment of socialist codes and narratives. Dabrowski asserts that tourism took a back seat to regional economic development under Polish socialism, and was less an aim than an afterthought. She demonstrates that the newly opened Bieszczady Mountain region was attractive to groups and individuals, if for varied, and unexpected, reasons. The Polish public was not interested in mass tourism with a socialist content, but rather in more leisurely, decidedly unproductive Moreover, the problems--including shortages--that tourists in the Bieszczady experienced were simply another small side of the increasing gulf between real lived socialism and the expectations of the Polish population. Neuberger analyzes the links among smoking and drinking and tourism in Bulgaria between 1956 and 1976 (the country was the eighth largest tobacco producer in the world and by 1966 the greatest exporter of cigarettes) when smoking among Bulgarians of every stripe was expanding more rapidly than drinking. The so-called debauched practices that accompanied Bulgarian tourism eventually came under official scrutiny, which favored healthy, active tourism. …

Eminent Victorians, Bloomsbury Queerness and John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

The life and work of John Maynard Keynes should be situated in relation to his membership of the Bloomsbury Group. The members of this circle of friends experimented in their lives and works with a variety of transgressions of contemporary expectations of performances of gender and sexuality. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) had a significant influence on the way in which Keynes depicted the allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The culture of Bloomsbury queerness played a significant role in the way in which Keynes described and caricatured his political opponents. The huge popularity of Keynes' work suggests that further questions need to be asked concerning the gendered performances of allied leadership in the aftermath of World War One and the popular perceptions of those performances.

Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation ed. by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (review)

Reviews to consider transgressing the boundary between them," she calls for a reconsideration of how ideas about bodies and their abilities inform approaches to the analysis ofVictorian literature (31). She also describes the achievements ofher own text. Pointing to new arenas for study, contributing to the development ofnew methodologies and redirecting the critical gaze towards bodies and identities that have received inadequate critical attention, both Martha Stoddard Holmes and Maria Frawley make contributions to the fields ofliterary criticism, disability studies and nineteenth-century studies, not least among them their focus on and reappraisal ofthe historical and cultural valuation ofhuman bodies. Vanessa Warne University ofManitoba DDDDDDDDDDDD Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, eds. Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation. (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004), xii + 259 pp. Over the last few decades, critics have been devoting more attention to the previously overlooked sensation writing ofthe nineteenth century. Somewhat surprising, then, is how the scholarly work in this field has been rather limited in its scope. Critics have focused mainly on the most popular or prolific sensation writers, the sensation novels ofthe 1860s, and the foregrounded theme ofthe female criminal in these novels. However, a new collection ofessays, Victorian Crime, Madness, andSensation edited by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, shows sensation writing to be a much wider field with more literary value and social influence than previously thought. This collection explores how sensation writing tapped into historically specific anxieties in ways that, until now, were not immediately obvious. Victorian Crime, Madness, andSensation is part of a substantial series of texts on the nineteenth century published by Ashgate. This series aims to embrace a "broad scope in chronology, approach and range ofconcern, and ... to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations 'Romantic' and 'Victorian'" (vii). This collection certainly fulfills that aim, as its essays focus on the writers and 96volume 32 number 2 Reviews readers throughout the Victorian period who were increasingly interested in domestic crime and social deviance, an interest that was exemplified by the emergence ofthe popular sensation novel in the 1860s. The significance of this broad approach is made clear in the introduction to the essays: "By surveying a diverse range ofcrimes, criminals, detectives, modes ofdetection and reportage, we chart the development ofcrime writing as a genre and the growing dialogue between fact and fiction throughout Victoria's reign" (1). Both canonical and liminal texts are represented in this collection, such as Ellen Wood's East Lynne, M. E. Braddon's LadyAudleys Secret, Margaret Oliphants SaUm Chapel, Charlotte Yonge's The Trial, James Thomson's The City ofDreadfulDelight, AnthonyTrollope's The Way We Live Now, R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case ofDr. fekyllandMr. Hyde, Wilkie Collins' BlindLove, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. The essays examine not simply the most salacious crimes, such as murder, but a wide variety oftransgressions, such as child abduction, bigamy, stalking, infanticide, poisoning, sex crimes and crimes against property. Furthermore, the essays are interdisciplinary in that they move beyond literary fiction to explore Victorian journalism, the penny blood serial, urban trade and industrial consumption, the evolutionary debates, science and technology, sexual deviance, the growth ofa police force, criminal psychology and sensational court trials. There are 15 essays in total, arranged in chronological order to offer a comprehensive survey ofsensational events in fact and fiction throughout Victoria's reign. John Plunkett opens the collection with an innovative essay, titled "Regicide and Reginamania: G. W. M. Reynolds and The Mysteries ofLondon." In this chapter, Plunkett traces the sensation engendered by Victoria's enthronement, the political value in making Victoria's image available to her subjects and the trope ofan individual and collective madness that was used to describe subjects who became the most fervent "consumers] ofher image" (18). Plunkett explains that these stalkers, who came to be known as "The Queen's Lovers," were "taken up as a trope to demonstrate the collective ardour surrounding Victoria. Those who were literally insane became symptomatic ofa more general condition of madness through excessive loyalty" (18). The media-constructed sensation around Victoria and one stalker's obsession with her are given an interesting political twist in G. W. M. Reynolds' series TheMysteries ofLondon. Plunkett argues that...