Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature PDF Author: Sophie Gilmartin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521560948
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature PDF Author: Sophie Gilmartin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521560948
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

After Dickens

After Dickens PDF Author: John Glavin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139425889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
After Dickens is both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. John Glavin conducts a historical inquiry into Dickens's relationship to the theatre and theatricality of his own time, and uncovers a much more ambivalent, often hostile, relationship than has hitherto been noticed. In this context, Dickens's novels can be seen as a form of counter-performance, one which would allow the author to perform without being seen or scrutinized. But Glavin also identifies a rich performative potential in Dickens's fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations. The book as a whole, therefore, offers a reading of Dickens through an unusual alliance between literary criticism and theatrical performance.

Reflecting on Darwin

Reflecting on Darwin PDF Author: Eckart Voigts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317069676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Taking up the historical evolution of Darwin and his theories and the cultural responses they have inspired, Reflecting on Darwin poses the following questions: 'How are the apparatuses in the mid-nineteenth century and at the turn of the twenty-first century interconnected with bio-scientific paradigms in art, literature, culture and science?' 'How are naturalism, determinism and Darwinism - the eugenics of the nineteenth century and the genetic coding of the twentieth century - positioned, embodied and staged in various media configurations and media genres?' and 'How have particular media apparatuses formed, displaced or stabilized the various concepts of humankind in the framework of evolutionary theory?' Ranging from the early circulation of Darwin’s ideas to the present, this interdisciplinary collection pays particular attention to Darwin’s postmillennial reception. Beginning with an overview of the historical development of contemporary ecological and ethical fears, Reflecting on Darwin then turns to Darwin’s influence on contemporary media, neo-Victorian literature and culture, science fiction literature and film, and contemporary theory. In examining the plurality of ways in which Darwin has been rewritten and reappropriated, this unique volume both mirrors and inspects the complexity of recent debates in Victorian and neo-Victorian studies.

Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction

Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction PDF Author: Sophie Gilmartin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748632557
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry. * Unique in providing a comprehensive criticism of Hardy's entire output of short stories. * Full, detailed, close readings of a number of key stories make this useful as a potential teaching resource. * Draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset that is partly uncovered and partly hidden in Hardy's portrayals of his fictional Wessex. * Offers fascinating insights into Hardy's near-obsession in his mature phase with the marriage contract, and with its legal binding of erratic men and women.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108335837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Gendering Walter Scott

Gendering Walter Scott PDF Author: C.M. Jackson-Houlston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317129571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott’s novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus—the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott’s novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott’s female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott’s ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Aging by the Book

Aging by the Book PDF Author: Kay Heath
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791477266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Uncovers the origins of midlife anxiety in Victorian print culture.

The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination

The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination PDF Author: Gautam Chakravarty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139442411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Gautam Chakravarty explores representations of the event which has become known in the British imagination as the 'Indian Mutiny' of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers, Chakravarty shows how narratives of the rebellion were inflected by the concerns of colonial policy and by the demands of imperial self-image. He goes on to discuss the wider context of British involvement in India from 1765 to the 1940s, and engages with constitutional debates, administrative measures, and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian novel. Chakravarty approaches the mutiny from the perspectives of postcolonial theory as well as from historical and literary perspectives to show the extent to which the insurrection took hold of the popular imagination in both Britain and India. The book has a broad interdisciplinary appeal and will be of interest to scholars of English literature, British imperial history, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age PDF Author: Alistair Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of the rich Victorian taxonomy of vagrancy, and the concepts of poverty, mobility and homelessness it expressed.

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire PDF Author: Jessica Howell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Study of malaria in literature and culture illuminates the legacies of nineteenth-century colonial medicine within narratives of illness.