Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel PDF Author: Adam Grener
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Explores the importance of chance, coincidence, and contingency in the Victorian realist novel.

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel PDF Author: Adam Grener
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Explores the importance of chance, coincidence, and contingency in the Victorian realist novel.

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel PDF Author: Adam Grener
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814255933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the importance of chance, coincidence, and contingency in the Victorian realist novel.

Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Jesse Molesworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521191084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A study of the relationship between realism, probability and chance in eighteenth-century fiction.

Narrative and Its Nonevents

Narrative and Its Nonevents PDF Author: Carra Glatt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813948711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work, that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century Paris, to the final disclosure that Pip returns home too late to marry Biddy but is now free to pursue his lost love Estella. Through careful examination of the plots of such classics as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and others, Glatt argues for the central role of these "unwritten plots" in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the allegorical mode—in which characters are bound by fixed identities to reach a predetermined conclusion—and turning away from classical and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are invested in these stories of David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet or Lucy Snowe in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.

Figures of Chance I

Figures of Chance I PDF Author: Anne Duprat
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003828809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a transhistorical analysis that will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.

Victorian Contingencies

Victorian Contingencies PDF Author: Tina Young Choi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503629767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture—by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and upended forgone conclusions. Victorian Contingencies shows how scientists, novelists, and consumers engaged in new formal and material experiments with cause and effect, past and present, that actively undermined routine certainties. Tina Young Choi traces contingency across a wide range of materials and media, from newspaper advertisements and children's stories to well-known novels, scientific discoveries, technological innovations. She shows how Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin reinvented geological and natural histories as spaces for temporal and causal experimentation, while the nascent insurance industry influenced Charles Babbage's computational designs for a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. Choi pairs novelists George Eliot and Lewis Carroll with physicist James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrating how they introduced possibility and probability into once-assured literary and scientific narratives. And she explores the popular board games and pre-cinematic visual entertainments that encouraged Victorians to navigate a world made newly uncertain. By locating contingency within these cultural contexts, this book invites a deep and multidisciplinary reassessment of the longer histories of causality, closure, and chance.

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Christine Gerhardt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110481324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

The Art of Uncertainty

The Art of Uncertainty PDF Author: Daniel Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009436112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Daniel Williams shows how, in a profoundly numerical age, Victorian novels imagined thought and action in the face of uncertainty.

The Kingdoms

The Kingdoms PDF Author: Natasha Pulley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635576091
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
For fans of The 7 1⁄2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved. Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. Swept out to sea with a hardened British sea captain named Kite, who might know more about Joe's past than he's willing to let on, Joe will remake history, and himself. From bestselling author Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms is an epic, romantic, wildly original novel that bends genre as easily as it twists time.

Uncertain Chances

Uncertain Chances PDF Author: Maurice S. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.