How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791076784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Deirdre David
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107005132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199533148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 829

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

Reductive Reading

Reductive Reading PDF Author: Sarah Danielle Allison
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425629
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introduction the syntax of Victorian moralizing: on choosing a proxy for style -- In defense of reading reductively -- The shockingly subtle criticism of the London Quarterly Review, 1855-1861 -- Relative clauses and the narrative present tense in George Eliot -- generalization and declamation : Elizabeth Barrett Browning's present-tense poetics -- A moral technology: speech tags in Charles Dickens's dialogue -- Conclusion : a grammar of perception

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Barbara Dennis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521775953
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. This book invites readers to reflect on the whole phenomenon of the Victorian novel and its role in dissecting and informing the society which produced it. The reasons for the growth of the novel and its spectacular success is also examined and discussed. Texts and extracts from a selection of Victorian novels and essays, including some material that readers will be unfamiliar with, help to provide a broader understanding of the range of Victorian fiction. Authors include: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm.

The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel

The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Daniel Hack
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923451
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.

Reading for Health

Reading for Health PDF Author: Erika Wright
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.