Author: Richard C. Stevenson
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838755754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book argues that George Meredith as a writer of Victorian fiction is most critical for us today because of the ways in which he wrote against convention. The focus is on seven novels (An Essay on Comedy. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, The Egoist, One of Our Conquerors, Lord Ormont and His Aminta, and The Amazing Marriage) which clearly illuminate the experimental and transgressive impulse in Meredith, as seen in his treatment of controversial contemporary themes, in his departures from conventions of genre, and in his innovations with narrative technique, and the representation of consciousness. canonical writers we now associate with the first wave of modernism in the English novel. James, and then Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Conrad, Ford, and Joyce, to varying degrees, all saw Meredith as an influence to be reckoned with in their own novelistic experimentation - an influence, this book proposes, essential to understanding the modernist translation of nineteenth-century realism into new formal, thematic, and psychological realms. twentieth-century British novel at the University of Oregon.
Author: Daniel Tyler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108427510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Demonstrates the importance of attending to literary style in Victorian novels and provides exemplary readings of major novelists.
Author: Jacqueline P. Banerjee
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
ISBN: 0746312148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction distilled, contributed to and animated the major debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure, he has always had his admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets ofModern Love, his 'Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit', and novels like The Egoist, have attained the status of classics. The present study focuses on such works, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century.
Author: George Meredith
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770481214
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 631
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Book Description
In The Egoist, his comic masterpiece, George Meredith takes the traditional marriage plot of English domestic fiction and turns it on its head. The novel describes the repeated and disastrous courtships of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist of the title. Three women become engaged to Sir Willoughby, but, despite his aristocratic arrogance and the manipulative power of his wealth, each is finally able to see him more clearly than he sees himself. The introduction to this edition provides context for the novel from Meredith’s own life, his theory of comedy, and his understanding of Darwinian thought. The appendices include reviews, other writing on comedy, and historical documents on women, sexual politics, and the theory of evolution.
Author: Irena Zovko Dinković
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443892122
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time – the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place, and the history of the discipline itself. Since literary studies engage contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must also acknowledge processes and events outside the field. The contributions to this volume engage with the idea of temporality not only in Anglophone literature studies, but in the humanities as a whole. In the first section, the literary contributions show that the humanities owe a debt to the past – new paradigms question and challenge the validity of older ones without necessarily discarding them. The second section shows how the disciplinary archive can be modified and expanded to engage its present condition, while the last deals with what that condition forebodes. Despite the range of perspectives adopted here, all contributions echo the history of the discipline of literary studies itself, its present condition, and the possibilities for its survival in an age in which the relevance of humanities is being disputed.
Author: Alice Crossley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.
Author: Melissa Shields Jenkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317136306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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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.
Author: Anna Maria Jones
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
"In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating "invisibly" in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader's engagement with the text." "In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines "problem novels" - that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally embedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists' attachments to critical "detective work" closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Bill Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894692
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This is a book about readers on the move in the age of Victorian empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.
Author: Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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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.
