Victorian Narratives Of The Recent Past

Author : Helen Kingstone
Publisher : Springer
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2017-03-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319495507

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Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past by Helen Kingstone Pdf

This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The legacy of Romantic historicism, the professionalization of the historical discipline, and even the growth of social history, all heightened the stakes. This book brings together Victorian histories and novels to show how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. Many historians shrank from engaging with controversial recent events. This study showcases the work of those rare historians who defied convention, including the polymath Harriet Martineau, English nationalist J. R. Green, and liberal enthusiast Spencer Walpole. A striking number of popular Victorian novels are retrospective. This book argues that Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot’s “novels of the recent past” are long overdue recognition as genuinely historical novels. By focusing on provincial communities, these novelists reveal undercurrents invisible to national narratives, and intervene in debates about women’s contribution to history.

Author : Jason B. Jones
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814210390

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Lost Causes by Jason B. Jones Pdf

What if we didn't always historicize when we read Victorian fiction? Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature's engagement with history has to be read otherwise. Perhaps perversely, Lost Causes suggests simultaneously that psychoanalysis speaks pressingly to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a- nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language's representation of the real. Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes. In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Lost Causes demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge--one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1995-10-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521471338

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Novels Behind Glass by Andrew H. Miller Pdf

Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Author : Tamara S Wagner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2016-05-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317002161

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Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration by Tamara S Wagner Pdf

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

Author : Tamara S Wagner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317323136

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Victorian Settler Narratives by Tamara S Wagner Pdf

This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperialist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as ‘girl Crusoes’ in works of fiction.

Author : Sean Grass
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2019-10-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108484459

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Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative by Sean Grass Pdf

An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

Author : Rachel Hollander
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 49,5 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 : Gretchen Braun
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2024-01-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814258328

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Narrating Trauma by Gretchen Braun Pdf

Draws on current theories of trauma to examine the prehistory of those psychic and somatic responses to trauma now known as PTSD and their influence on Victorian fiction.

Author : L. Hadley
Publisher : Springer
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2010-10-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230317499

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Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative by L. Hadley Pdf

Placing the popular genre of neo-Victorian fiction within the context of the contemporary cultural fascination with the Victorians, this book argues that these novels are distinguished by a commitment to historical specificity and understands them within their contemporary context and the context of Victorian historical and literary narratives.

Author : Suzy Anger
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : 080148765X

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Knowing the Past by Suzy Anger Pdf

Text vs. hypertext: seeing the Victorian object as in itself it really is / Gerhard Joseph -- The golden bough and the unknowable / Christopher Herbert -- Daniel Deronda: a new epistemology / George Levine -- Walter Pater's impressionism and the form of historical revival Carolyn Williams -- Arnold and the authorization of criticism / Herbert F. Tucker -- Aesthetics, ethics, and unreadable acts in George Eliot / Jonathan Loesberg -- The structure of anxiety in political economy and Hard times / Mary Poovey -- How to be a benefactor without any money: the chill of welfare in Great expectations / Bruce Robbins -- Tracking the sentimental eye / Judith Stoddart -- Knowing and telling in Dickens's retrospects / Rosemarie Bodenheimer -- Inside the shark's mouth: William Lovett's struggle for political language / Margery Sabin -- Knowing a life: Edith Simcox, Sat est vixisse? / Gillian Beer.

Author : Caroline Levine
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0813922178

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The Serious Pleasures of Suspense by Caroline Levine Pdf

Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".

Author : Kevin Swafford
Publisher : Cambria Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Class consciousness in literature
ISBN : 9781621968115

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Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation by Kevin Swafford Pdf

Author : Reima Välimäki
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2022-11-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781350232914

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Medievalism in Finland and Russia by Reima Välimäki Pdf

Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students. The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russia offers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently even more poorly understood than Russia in the discussions about global medievalism. It is usually mentioned only as of the birthplace of the Soldiers of Odin. The street patrol is, however, a marginal phenomenon in Finnish medievalism as this volume demonstrates. Instead of merely adopting the medievalist interpretation of the international alt-right, even the right-wing populists in Finland refer more to the nationalistic medievalist tradition, where crusades do not mark a Western Christian victory over the Muslim East, but a Swedish occupation of Finnish lands. In addition to presenting particular cases of medievalism, the chapters here on Finland challenge and diversify today's prevailing interpretation of shared online medievalism of European and American right-wing populists. This book reveals that while medievalisms in Finland and Russia share many features with the contemporary Anglo-American medievalist imaginations, they also display many original characteristics due to particular political situations and indigenous medievalist traditions. They have their own meta-medievalisms, cumulative core ideas and interpretations about the medieval past that are thoroughly examined here in English for the very first time.

Author : Elizabeth Langland
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 081420905X

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Telling Tales by Elizabeth Langland Pdf

Publisher's description: Telling Tales offers new and original readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It also presents new archival material on the lives and stories of working-class women in Victorian Britain. Finally, it sets forth innovative interpretations of the complex ways in which gender informs the abstract cultural narratives--like space, aesthetic value, and nationality--through which a populace comes to know and position itself. Focusing on the interrelations of form, gender, and culture in narratives of the Victorian period, Telling Tales explores the close interplay between gender as manifest in specific literary works and gender as manifest in Victorian culture. The latter does not reflect a shift away from form toward culture, but rather a steady concern of form-in-culture. Reading and analyzing Victorian novels provides an education for reading and interpreting the broader culture. The book's several chapters explore and pose answers to important questions about the impact of gender on narrative in Victorian culture: How do women writers respond to themes and narrative structures of precursor male writers? What are the very real differences that shape a newly emerging tradition of female authorship? How does gender enter into the determination of aesthetic value? How does gender enter into the national imaginary 3/4the idea of Englishness? In exploring these key concerns, Telling Tales establishes a broad terrain for future inquiries that take gender as an organizing term and principle for analysis of narratives in all periods.

Author : Madeleine C. Seys
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2017-08-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351747196

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Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature by Madeleine C. Seys Pdf

We know that way we dress says a lot about us. It’s drilled into us by our parents as children, as adults throughout our working lives, and eternally from the culture surrounding us. Our dress tells the outside world of the culture and era we come from to our social status within that culture. Our dress can be telling of our political views, religious beliefs, sexuality and countless other identifying traits that we can keep hidden or show to the world by our choice of what to wear when heading venturing out. This was absolutely true, famously so, in the Victorian Era in which men and women alike wore their status on their often lavish, embellished sleeves. In her new book, Dr. Madeleine Seyes explores Victorian culture through the lens of fashion in her new book, Double Threads: Fashion and Victorian Popular Literature, which sits at the intersection of the fields of Victorian literary studies, dress and material cultural studies, feminist literary criticism, and gender and sexuality studies.