000			02625nam a22002297a 4500
005			20240807124510.0
008			240807b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780691128009
028			_a: Raghav Books Pvt. Ltd. _b: A-184, A, Nand Gram, Ghaziabad,U.P. _c: 870 _d: 5/8/2024
082			_a306.7086 KOV
100			_aKoven, Seth.
245			_aSlumming _b: Sexual & Social Politics in Victorian London . _c/ Seth Koven.
260			_a, London _b: Princeton University Press _c,2004.
300			_axvii, 399p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b2731
520			_aIn the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
650			_aSocial Politics
650			_aSexual & Social
650			_aSocial Science
700			_aSeth Koven
942			_cBOOK
999			_c62191 _d62191