Victorian Criticism Of The Novel

Author : Edwin M. Eigner,George J. Worth
Publisher : CUP Archive
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 1985-11-07
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521275202

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Victorian Criticism of the Novel by Edwin M. Eigner,George J. Worth Pdf

By the end of the nineteenth century the novel unquestionably had become the most popular and influential of English literary forms. Yet it has not always been clear how the Victorians themselves regarded the nature of prose fiction. This volume is a collection of twelve 'landmark' essays that chart the development of English theories of fiction during the great age of the novel. Spanning the whole of the Victorian period, from Bulwer Lytton's 'On Art in Fiction' (1838) to Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), the volume also includes pieces by George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a number of the more important critics and reviewers of the time. The editors' introduction surveys the main issues, such as the debate between realism and romance, addressed by novel criticism throughout the period. Each of the selections that follow is set in its historical context by a prefatory essay and is fully annotated for the student. There is a helpful bibliography of further reading.

Author : Ian Watt,Ian P. Watt
Publisher : London ; New York : Oxford University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1971
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0195013220

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The Victorian Novel by Ian Watt,Ian P. Watt Pdf

A collection of essays which describes the reading audience, publication methods, and literary style of the Victorian novel and provides a critical analysis of the period's major fiction writers.

Author : Lee Behlman,Anne Longmuir
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : English literature
ISBN : 0415830982

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Victorian Literature by Lee Behlman,Anne Longmuir Pdf

Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates offers a comprehensive introduction to the critical debates about Victorian Literature, addressing the most popular and engaging topics in the field today.

Author : Daniel Hack
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 081392345X

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The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel by Daniel Hack Pdf

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.

Author : Laura C. Berry
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813934575

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The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel by Laura C. Berry Pdf

The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

Author : Leah Price
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 41,9 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 : Anonim
Publisher : Cambria Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-13
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781621969792

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Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel by Anonim Pdf

Author : Rohan Maitzen
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 47,6 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 : Robin Gilmour
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-08-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317207436

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The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel by Robin Gilmour Pdf

First published in 1981, this book represents the first comprehensive examination of Victorian society’s preoccupation with the ‘notion of the gentleman’ and how this was reflected in the literature of the time. Starting with Addison and Lord Chesterfield, the author explores the influence of the gentlemanly ideal on the evolution of the English middle classes, and reveals its central part in the novels of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope. Combining social and cultural analysis with literary criticism, this book provides new readings of Vanity Fair and Great Expectations, a fresh approach to Trollope, and a detailed account of the various streams that fed into the idea of the gentleman.

Author : Isobel Armstrong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 554 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2002-09-11
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781134970667

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Victorian Poetry by Isobel Armstrong Pdf

In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

Author : Lisa Rodensky
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 829 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199533145

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The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel by Lisa Rodensky Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Author : Francis O'Gorman
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780470779859

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The Victorian Novel by Francis O'Gorman Pdf

This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Author : Rachel Hollander
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-01-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136156267

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Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction by Rachel Hollander Pdf

Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality. Hollander reads texts that both portray and enact a unique ethical orientation of welcoming the other, a narrative hospitality that combines the Victorians’ commitment to engaging with the real world with a more modern awareness of difference and the limits of knowledge. While classic nineteenth-century realism rests on a sympathy-based model of moral relations, novels by authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner present instead an ethical recognition of the distance between self and other. Opening themselves to the other in their very structure and narrative form, the visited texts both represent and theorize the ethics of hospitality, anticipating twentieth-century philosophy’s recognition of the limits of sympathy. As colonial conflicts, nationalist anxiety, and the intensification of the "woman question" became dominant cultural concerns in the 1870s and 80s, the problem of self and other, known and unknown, began to saturate and define the representation of home in the English novel. This book argues that in the wake of an erosion of confidence in the ability to understand that which is unlike the self, a moral code founded on sympathy gave way to an ethics of hospitality, in which the concept of home shifts to acknowledge the permeability and vulnerability of not only domestic but also national spaces. Concluding with Virginia Woolf’s reexamination of the novel’s potential to educate the reader in negotiating relations of alterity in a more fully modernist moment, Hollanders suggest that the late Victorian novel embodies a unique and previously unrecognized ethical mode between Victorian realism and a post-World- War-I ethics of modernist form.

Author : Emily Allen
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Actors in literature
ISBN : 0814209319

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Theater Figures by Emily Allen Pdf

Why did nineteenth-century novels return, over again, to the scene of theater? Emily Allen argues that theater provided nineteenth-century novels, novelists, and critics with a generic figure that allowed them to position particular novels and novelistic genres within a complex literary field. Novel genres high and low, male and female, public and private, realistic and romantic, all came to identify themselves within a set of coordinates that included--if only for the purpose of exclusion--the spectacular figure of theater. This figure likewise provided a trope around and against which to construct images of readers and authors, images that most frequently worked to mediate between the supposedly private acts of reading and writing and the very public facts of the print market. In readings of novels by Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Jewsbury, Flaubert, Braddon, and Moore, Allen shows how frequently theater appears as figure in novels of the nineteenth century, and how theater figures--actively and importantly--in what we have come to look back on as the history of the nineteenth-century novel. "Theater Figures thus offers a new model for thinking about how theater helped produce changes in the nineteenth-century literary market. While previous critics have considered theater as an enabling foil for the novel--either a constitutive opposite or constructive ally--Allen demonstrates how theater figures and tropes were used to negotiate competition among the novels and novelists eagerly seeking their share of the literary limelight.

Author : Jeannette King
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1978-01-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521216702

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Tragedy in the Victorian Novel by Jeannette King Pdf

How does one dominant literary genre fall into decline, to be superseded by another? The classic instance is the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, and how it came to embody the tragic vision of life which had previously been the domain of drama. Dr King focuses on three novelists, George Eliot. Thomas Hardy and Henry James. All three, while trying to offer a realistic picture of life in prose narrative, wrote with the concept of tragedy clearly in mind. The concern was widespread, and Victorian literary critics found themselves discussing the problem of how one might reconcile concepts as dissimilar as tragedy and realism. Their criticism provides Dr King with her starting point. Dr King examines the work of her three authors in relation to the large concepts of traditional tragic thought, and also examines how the form of specific novels was affected by their differing ideas of tragedy.