My Victorian Novel

Author : ANNETTE R. FEDERICO
Publisher : University of Missouri
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826222077

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My Victorian Novel by ANNETTE R. FEDERICO Pdf

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Author : Annette R. Federico
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2020-05-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826274434

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My Victorian Novel by Annette R. Federico Pdf

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Author : Rohan Maitzen
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-06-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781551117690

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The Victorian Art of Fiction by Rohan Maitzen Pdf

The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses where Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”

Author : Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2012-06-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781421405919

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Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel by Vanessa L. Ryan Pdf

In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

Author : Leah Price
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2012-04-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400842186

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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price Pdf

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Author : Rachel Vorona Cote
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2020-02-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781538729717

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Too Much by Rachel Vorona Cote Pdf

Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

Author : Alice Wykeham-Martin Pollock
Publisher : Johnson Publications Limited (UK)
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1971
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015002996786

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Portrait of My Victorian Youth by Alice Wykeham-Martin Pollock Pdf

Author : Kathryn Hughes
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781421425702

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Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes Pdf

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

Author : Lyndsay Faye
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2016-03-22
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780698155954

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Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye Pdf

The reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer that The New York Times Book Review calls “wonderfully entertaining” and USA Today describes as “sheer mayhem meets Victorian propriety”—nominated for the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel. “Reader, I murdered him.” A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess. Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past? “A thrill ride of a novel. A must read for lovers of Jane Eyre, dark humor, and mystery.”—PopSugar.com

Author : Michel Faber
Publisher : HarperCollins Canada
Page : 1049 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2010-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781443401586

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Crimson Petal And The White by Michel Faber Pdf

One of the most talked-about novels of the year, this international bestseller gives new meaning to the term “unputdownable.” Reviewers and readers everywhere have been eagerly abandoning their everyday lives for days and even weeks on end, refusing to leave Michel Faber’s vividly realized fictional world. They are captivated by Sugar, an enigmatic nineteen-year-old prostitute whose story begins in a hellish nineteenth-century London brothel. Struggling to lift her body and soul out of the gutter, Sugar claws her way up the social ladder to gain refuge in the wealthy family of her besotted lover, William Rackham, unwilling heir to a perfumery. Now in the popular Perennial format, The Crimson Petal and the White is a gripping tale, extraordinarily rich, intricate and intoxicating to the final page.

Author : Francis O'Gorman
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780470757550

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A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel by Francis O'Gorman Pdf

This volume presents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900. Opens up for the reader the cultural world in which the Victorian novel was written and read. Crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Provides fresh perspectives on how Victorian fiction relates to different contexts, such as class, sexuality, empire, psychology, law and biology.

Author : Tara MacDonald
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317317791

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The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel by Tara MacDonald Pdf

By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

Author : Susan E. Colon
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 125 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2012-02-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781441148261

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Victorian Parables by Susan E. Colon Pdf

The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and Lazarus and the rich man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. In this book Susan E. Colòn shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral ideas. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources.

Author : Deirdre David
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107005136

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The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel by Deirdre David Pdf

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

Author : Carolyn Lesjak
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2007-01-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780822388340

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Working Fictions by Carolyn Lesjak Pdf

Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.