English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316300870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Victorian science changed language from a tool into a natural phenomenon, evolving independently of its speakers. Will Abberley explores how science and fiction interacted in imagining different stories of language evolution. Popular narratives of language progress clashed with others of decay and degeneration. Furthermore, the blurring of language evolution with biological evolution encouraged Victorians to re-imagine language as a mixture of social convention and primordial instinct. Abberley argues that fiction by authors such as Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells not only reflected these intellectual currents, but also helped to shape them. Genres from utopia to historical romance supplied narrative models for generating thought experiments in the possible pasts and futures of language. Equally, fiction that explored the instinctive roots of language intervened in debates about language standardisation and scientific objectivity. These textual readings offer new perspectives on twenty-first-century discussions about language evolution and the language of science.

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316300870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Victorian science changed language from a tool into a natural phenomenon, evolving independently of its speakers. Will Abberley explores how science and fiction interacted in imagining different stories of language evolution. Popular narratives of language progress clashed with others of decay and degeneration. Furthermore, the blurring of language evolution with biological evolution encouraged Victorians to re-imagine language as a mixture of social convention and primordial instinct. Abberley argues that fiction by authors such as Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells not only reflected these intellectual currents, but also helped to shape them. Genres from utopia to historical romance supplied narrative models for generating thought experiments in the possible pasts and futures of language. Equally, fiction that explored the instinctive roots of language intervened in debates about language standardisation and scientific objectivity. These textual readings offer new perspectives on twenty-first-century discussions about language evolution and the language of science.

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107101166
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, from primordial noise to modern English.

Conversing in Verse

Conversing in Verse PDF Author: Elizabeth Helsinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009200178
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Conversing in Verse considers poems of conversation from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries – the very period when a more restrictive conception of poetry as the lyric product of the poet's solitary self-communing became entrenched. With fresh insight, Elizabeth Helsinger addresses a range of questions at the core of conversational poetry: When and why do poets turn to conversation to explore poetry's potential? How do conversation's forms and intentions shape the figures, rhythms, and prosody of poems to alter the reader's experience? What are the ethical and political stakes of conversing in verse? Coleridge, Clare, Landor, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Michael Field, and Hardy each composed poems that open difficult or impossible conversations with phenomena outside themselves. Helsinger unearths an unfamiliar lyric history that produced some of the most interesting formal experiments of the nineteenth century, including its best known, the dramatic monologue.

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination PDF Author: Peter J. Capuano
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501772880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author: Alex Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108658598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of cinema on Decadence, and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009271806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Political Lives of Victorian Animals

The Political Lives of Victorian Animals PDF Author: Anna Feuerstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108492967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Hosanna Krienke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108844847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Art of the Reprint

The Art of the Reprint PDF Author: Rosalind Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009272012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader.

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages PDF Author: Eavan O'Dochartaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108834337
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.