Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Marsh, Joss

Paperback

Literary CriticismWriting InstructionBritish History

ISBN10: 0226506916
ISBN13: 9780226506913
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Aug 15 1998
Pages: 362
Weight: 1.32
Height: 0.98 Width: 6.05 Depth: 9.09
Language: English
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.

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