Author: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.
Author: Annette Federico
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003844715
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Reading the Victorian Novel is a clear and engaging introduction to Victorian fiction. In this book, Annette Federico invites readers to turn their attention to the bursting imaginations and formal inventiveness of Victorian novelists themselves. Five conventions prevailed in the building of a Victorian novel: serialisation, narration, plotting, description, and characterization. Each chapter is rich in examples of these practices and attentive to the historical and cultural contexts that shaped them, as well as to the responses and judgments of Victorian readers and contemporary scholars. Federico keeps the focus on the writer’s choices and the reader’s experience––on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history. Reading the Victorian Novel is an appreciative and discerning guide for anyone with an interest in the resonant and vibrant worlds of nineteenth-century fiction.
Author: Jennifer Hayward
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813184479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
"To be continued..." Whether these words fall at the end of The Empire Strikes Back or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. In Consuming Pleasures jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre-one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called, after Wittgenstein, "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, and such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts—Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-46), and the soap operas All My Children (1970-) and One Life to Live (1968-)—to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre, and to analyze the peculiar draw serials have upon their audiences. Although the serial has enjoyed great marketplace success, traditional literary and social critics have denounced its ties to mass culture, claiming it preys upon passive fans. But Hayward argues that active serial audiences have developed identifiable strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process.
Author: Andrew Lang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Author: Helen Emma Wieand Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Deception in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 562
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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law reports, digests, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 1294
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Book Description
Author: William Mack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1132
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Author: Cora Marsland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Readers
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Author: Eduardo González
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813929873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
The literature of Cuba, argues Eduardo González in this new book, takes on quite different features depending on whether one is looking at it from "the inside" or from "the outside," a view that in turn is shaped by official political culture and the authors it sanctions or by those authors and artists who exist outside state policies and cultural politics. González approaches this issue by way of two twentieth-century writers who are central to the canon of gay homoerotic expression and sensibility in Cuban culture: José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) and Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990). Drawing on the plots and characters in their works, González develops both a story line and a moral tale, revolving around the Christian belief in the fall from grace and the possibility of redemption, that bring the writers into a unique and revealing interaction with one another. The work of Lezama Lima and Arenas is compared with that of fellow Cuban author Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979) and, in a wider context, with the non-Cuban writers John Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, John Ruskin, and James Joyce to show how their themes get replicated in González’s selected Cuban fiction. Also woven into this interaction are two contemporary films—The Devil’s Backbone (2004) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2007)—whose moral and political themes enhance the ethical values and conflicts of the literary texts. Referring to this eclectic gathering of texts, González charts a cultural course in which Cuba moves beyond the Caribbean and into a latitude uncharted by common words, beyond the tyranny of place.
