The Socio Literary Imaginary In 19th And 20th Century Britain

Author : Maria K. Bachman,Albert D. Pionke
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000707144

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The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain by Maria K. Bachman,Albert D. Pionke Pdf

At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing emergence of what Thomas Carlyle, in "Signs of the Times" (1829), pejoratively labeled a new "Mechanical Age," Britain’s robust tradition of social thought was transformed by professionalization, institutionalization, and the birth of modern disciplinary fields. Writers and thinkers most committed to an approach grounded in empirical data and inductive reasoning, such as Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill, positioned themselves in relation to French positivist Auguste Comte’s recent neologism "la sociologie." Some Victorian and Edwardian novelists, George Eliot and John Galsworthy among them, became enthusiastic adopters of early sociological theory; others, including Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford, more idiosyncratically both complemented and competed with the "systems of society" proposed by their social scientific contemporaries. Chronologically bound within the period from the 1830s through the 1920s, this volume expansively reconstructs their expansive if never collective efforts. Individual essays focus on Comte, Dickens, Eliot, Ford, and Galsworthy, as well as Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Virginia Woolf, and others. The volume's introduction locates these author-specific contributions in the context of both the international intellectual history of sociology in Britain through the First World War and the interanimating intersections of sociological and literary theory from the work of Hippolyte Taine in the 1860s through the successive linguistic and digital turns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Author : Thomas Thurnell-Read,Laura Fenton
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783031040177

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Alcohol, Age, Generation and the Life Course by Thomas Thurnell-Read,Laura Fenton Pdf

This volume explores generational differences in alcohol consumption practices and examines the changing role of alcohol across the life course. It considers generational patterns in where, how and why people buy and consume alcohol and how these may interact with identity and belonging and considers how drinking alcohol in adolescence, adulthood, middle-age or later life takes on different functions, meanings and tensions. Alcohol is shown to play an important role in biographical transitions, such as in the coming of age rituals that mark the passage from adolescences to adulthood, whilst drinking alcohol in adulthood and in later life takes on new meanings, pleasures and risks in light of shifting roles and responsibilities relating to work, leisure and the family. The empirically-informed contributions draw on a range of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and a range of cultural contexts provides a nuanced examination of the role of alcohol at different life course stages and explores both continuity and change between generations.

Author : Kristen Pond
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2023-10-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000990089

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Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830–1865 by Kristen Pond Pdf

Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830-1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the industrial revolution, transportation technologies, and globalization. While studies of nineteenth-century Britain tend to trace the rise of an aloof cosmopolitanism and distancing narrative strategies, this volume calls attention to the personalizing impulse in nineteenth-century literary form, investigating the deeply personal reflections on individual and national identities. In her book, Dr. Pond leads the reader through homes of the urban poor, wandering the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, loitering in suburban neighborhoods, riding the railway, and touring a country estate. Readers will experience how the ordinary can be enchanting, and how the mundane can be unexpected, discovering a new way of thinking about strangers and their influence on our lives. Through an examination of the short and long fictional forms of Martineau, Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, and Braddon, this study locates the figure of the stranger as a powerful topos in the story Victorian literature and the ethics of social relations. This book will be ideal for those seeking to understand the dynamics of the stranger in Victorian fiction as a figure for understanding the changing dynamics of social relations in England in the early nineteenth century.

Author : William Baker,Richard Nemesvari
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 675 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2023-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781009037495

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Wilkie Collins in Context by William Baker,Richard Nemesvari Pdf

This collection of essays by international scholars celebrates the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins's birth by exploring his unconventional life alongside his works, critical responses to his writings and their afterlife, and the literary and cultural contexts which shaped his fiction. Topics discussed include gender, science and medicine, music, law, race and empire, media adaptations, neo-Victorianism, disability, and ethics. Along with an analysis of his novels, the essays included also recognize the importance of his short stories, journalism, and contributions to Victorian theatre, most notably illuminating the strong connections between sensation fiction and melodrama, as well as exploring his influence on film and TV. Engaging with yet also delving far beyond the famous novels, this volume promotes awareness of Collins' remarkable and diverse writerly achievements and paints a vivid portrait of an author whose fluctuating reputation among contemporary critics stands in stark contrast to his immense and still-enduring popularity.

Author : Miriam Borham-Puyal
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 139 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2020-01-15
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781000029635

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Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women by Miriam Borham-Puyal Pdf

This book explores the concept of liminality in the representation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, as well as in contemporary rewritings, such as novels, films, television shows, videogames, and graphic novels. In particular, the volume focuses on vampires, prostitutes, quixotes, and detectives as examples of new women who inhabit the margins of society and populate its narratives. Therefore, it places together for the first time four important liminal identities, while it explores a relevant corpus that comprises four centuries and several countries. Its diachronic, transnational, and comparative approach emphasizes the representation across time and space of female sexuality, gender violence, and women’s rights, also employing a liminal stance in its literary analysis: facing the past in order to understand the present. By underlining the dialogue between past and present this monograph contributes to contemporary debates on the representation of women and the construction of femininity as opposed to hegemonic masculinity, for it exposes the line of thought that has brought us to the present moment, hence, challenging assumed stereotypes and narratives. In addition, by using popular narratives and media, the present work highlights the value of literature, films, or alternative forms of storytelling to understand how women’s place in society, their voice, and their presence have been and are still negotiated in spaces of visibility, agency, and power.

Author : Thomas Albrecht
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-01-22
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781000029260

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The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht Pdf

The Ethical Vision of George Eliot is one of the first monographs devoted entirely to the ethical thought of George Eliot, a profoundly significant, influential figure not only in nineteenth-century English and European literature, nineteenth-century women’s writing, the history of the novel, and Victorian intellectual culture, but also in the field of literary ethics. Ethics are a predominant theme in Eliot’s fictional and non-fictional writings. Her ethical insights and ideas are a defining element of her greatness as an artist and novelist. Through meticulous close readings of Eliot’s fiction, essays, and letters, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot presents an original, complex definition of her ethical vision as she developed it over the course of her career. It examines major novels like Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda; many of Eliot’s most significant essays; and devotes two entire chapters to Eliot’s final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such, an idiosyncratic collection of character sketches that Eliot scholars have heretofore generally overlooked or ignored. The Ethical Vision of George Eliot demonstrates that Eliot defined her ethical vision alternately in terms of revealing and strengthening a fundamental human communion that links us to other persons, however different and remote from ourselves; and in terms of recognizing and respecting the otherness of other persons, and of the universe more generally, from ourselves. Over the course of her career, Eliot increasingly transitions from the former towards the latter imperative, but she also considerably complicates her conception of otherness, and of what it means to be ethically responsible to it.

Author : Ruth Heholt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2020-06-30
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN : 9781000173239

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Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics by Ruth Heholt Pdf

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

Author : Albert D Pionke
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2024-08-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1399507710

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Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status by Albert D Pionke Pdf

Reconstructs the surprising, self-interested and at times paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class status Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others. Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English at the University of Alabama.

Author : Chris Wilkes
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 435 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2024-05-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781036403027

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Britain's Flirtation with the Socialist Imaginary by Chris Wilkes Pdf

In 1945, Winston Churchill, fresh from winning World War Two for Britain, called an election. Within days, he was thrown out, and a completely new form of government took hold. What followed was a revolutionary period in British history, in which centuries of tradition were questioned. Socialism appeared to be waiting in the wings. This book traces the origins of this transformation in the long history of British democracy. It examines the ideas and actions which began in the 1930s that enabled this revolution and the new society that emerged beyond its origins and into the 21st Century. The problems that this revolution sought to solve remain to this day, as the British government in 2024 wrestles with strikes, social disorder, and massive economic headwinds. Understanding the history of the present dilemmas is essential if we are to grapple successfully with the enduring problems Britain still faces to this day.

Author : Roger Ebbatson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351958844

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An Imaginary England by Roger Ebbatson Pdf

In his highly theorised and original book, Roger Ebbatson traces the emergence of conceptions of England and Englishness from 1840 to 1920. His study concentrates on poetry and fiction by authors such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, Q, Rupert Brooke and D.H. Lawrence, reading them as a body of work through which a series of problematic English identities are imaginatively constructed. Of particular concern is the way literary landscapes serve as signs not only of identity but also of difference. Ebbatson demonstrates how a sense of cultural rootedness is contested during the period by the experiences of those on the societal margins, whether sexual, national, social or racial, resulting in a feeling of homelessness even in the most self-consciously 'English' texts. In the face of gradual imperial and industrial decline, Ebbatson argues, foreign and colonial cultures played a crucial role in transforming Englishness from a stable body of values and experiences into a much more ambiguous concept in continuous conflict with factors on the geographical or psychological 'periphery'.

Author : Bonnie S. McDougall
Publisher : Chinese University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Education
ISBN : 9629961059

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Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences by Bonnie S. McDougall Pdf

The authors and audiences for 20th century Chinese literature, especially fiction, are examined in a fresh light. While modern Chinese fictions are imaginary in that they do not constitute reliable portraits of Chinese life, they offer insights into the writers themselves and their implied audiences.

Author : Laura Brown
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781501772566

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The Counterhuman Imaginary by Laura Brown Pdf

The Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, The Counterhuman Imaginary offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture.

Author : Simon Dentith
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016-05-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317087342

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Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now by Simon Dentith Pdf

Envisioning today’s readers as poised between an impossible attempt to read texts as their original readers experienced them and an awareness of our own temporal moment, Simon Dentith complicates traditional prejudices against hindsight to approach issues of interpretation and historicity in nineteenth-century literature. Suggesting that the characteristic aesthetic attitude encouraged by the backward look is one of irony rather than remorse or regret, he examines works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Morris and John Ruskin in terms of their participation in significant histories that extend to this day. Liberalism, class, gender, political representation and notions of progress, utopianism and ecological concern as currently understood can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Just as today’s critics strive to respect the authenticity of nineteenth-century writers and readers who responded to these ideas within their historical world, so, too, do those nineteenth-century imaginings persist to challenge the assumptions of the present. It is therefore possible, Dentith argues, to conceive of the act of reading historical literature with an awareness of the historical context and of the difference between the past and the present while allowing that friction or difference to be part of how we think about a text and how it communicates. His book summons us to consider how words travel to the reality of the reader’s own time and how engagement with nineteenth-century writers’ anticipation of the judgements of future generations reveal hindsight’s capacity to transform our understanding of the past in the light of subsequent knowledge.

Author : Jason Marc Harris
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317134657

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Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Jason Marc Harris Pdf

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Author : Arthur James Wells
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : English literature
ISBN : STANFORD:36105215547287

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The British National Bibliography by Arthur James Wells Pdf