Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City

The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832-1914

Martin Hewitt author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:31st Mar '21

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Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City cover

This study explores the ‘ecology of knowledge’ of urban Britain in the Victorian period and seeks to examine the way in which Victorians comprehended the nature of their urban society, through an exploration of the history of Victorian Manchester, and two specific case studies on the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell and the campaigns for educational extension which emerged out of the city. It argues that crucial to the Victorians’ approaches was the ‘visiting mode’ as a particular discursive formation, including its institutional foundations, its characteristic modes and assumptions, and the texts which exemplify it. Recognition of the importance of the visiting mode, it is argued, offers a fundamental challenge to established Foucauldian interpretations of nineteenthcentury society and culture and provides an important corrective to recent scholarship of nineteenth-century technologies of knowing.

"Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City is a fascinating and invaluable corrective to Joyce’s instrumentalism. Throughout, Hewitt emphasises the importance of lines of sight and visual impressions: hence the role of housing conditions as synecdoche for social situation." - Simon J Morgan, Leeds Beckett University

ISBN: 9780367787936

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 149g

114 pages