Dickens and Heredity

Dickens and Heredity PDF Author: G. Morgentaler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230596320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

Dickens and Heredity

Dickens and Heredity PDF Author: G. Morgentaler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230596320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

Reading Adoption

Reading Adoption PDF Author: Marianne Novy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115075
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A literary scholar who is an adult adoptee delves into one of the enduring themes of literature--the child raised by other parents

Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791092933
Category : Dickens, Charles
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
A study guide to Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," featuring a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, summary and analysis, and a selection of critical views.

Dickens's Great Expectations

Dickens's Great Expectations PDF Author: Jerome Meckier
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel PDF Author: J. Kilroy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230604358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Through analysis of eight English novels of the Nineteenth century, this work explores the ways in which the novel contributes to the formation of ideology regarding the family, and, conversely, the ways in which changing attitudes toward the family shape and reshape the novel.

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791081680
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Presents an overview of the novel, featuring a biographical sketch of the English author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

Novel Science

Novel Science PDF Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923630
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.

Troubled Legacies

Troubled Legacies PDF Author: Allan Hepburn
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802091105
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Last wills and testaments create tensions between those who inherit and those who imagine that they should inherit. As Victorian, modern, and contemporary novels amply demonstrate, seldom is more energy expended than at the reading of a will. Whether inheritances bring disappointment or jubilation, they create a pattern for the telling of stories, stories that involve the transmission of legacies - cultural, political, and monetary - from one generation to the next. Troubled Legacies examines these narratives of inheritance in British and Irish fiction from 1800 to the present. The essays in this collection set out to juxtapose legal and novelistic discourse. This reading of literature against law produces intriguing and often provocative assertions about the specific relationship between novels and inheritance. As the contributors argue, novels reinforce property law, an argument bolstered by the examples of women, workers, Jews, and Irishmen dispossessed of their rights and unable to claim their cultural inheritances. Troubled Legacies thoroughly examines the connection between narrative and claims to legal entitlement, a topic that has not, to date, been comprehensively broached in literary studies.

Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907

Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 PDF Author: Dr Melissa Shields Jenkins
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472411633
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature

Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144223234X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.