The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel

The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Robin Gilmour
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317207432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
First published in 1981, this book represents the first comprehensive examination of Victorian society’s preoccupation with the ‘notion of the gentleman’ and how this was reflected in the literature of the time. Starting with Addison and Lord Chesterfield, the author explores the influence of the gentlemanly ideal on the evolution of the English middle classes, and reveals its central part in the novels of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope. Combining social and cultural analysis with literary criticism, this book provides new readings of Vanity Fair and Great Expectations, a fresh approach to Trollope, and a detailed account of the various streams that fed into the idea of the gentleman.

The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel

The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Robin Gilmour
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317207432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
First published in 1981, this book represents the first comprehensive examination of Victorian society’s preoccupation with the ‘notion of the gentleman’ and how this was reflected in the literature of the time. Starting with Addison and Lord Chesterfield, the author explores the influence of the gentlemanly ideal on the evolution of the English middle classes, and reveals its central part in the novels of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope. Combining social and cultural analysis with literary criticism, this book provides new readings of Vanity Fair and Great Expectations, a fresh approach to Trollope, and a detailed account of the various streams that fed into the idea of the gentleman.

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Tara MacDonald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

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: 1400842182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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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.

Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel

Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Arlene Young
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312223465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This book examines the interrelation of social class and its literary representation in Victorian Britain, focusing for the first time on the emergence of the lower middle class as a social and cultural phenomenon. It places the evolution of the lower middle class and its relation to other classes within the social structure of nineteenth-century England and within the historical context of changing perceptions of the idea of the gentlemen and the changing role of women, especially during the second half of the century. Arlene Young traces popular attitudes towards various representative class and cultural types through the examination of novels, comic sketches, and contemporary nineteenth-century social commentaries.

Scenes of Sympathy

Scenes of Sympathy PDF Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171998X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

The Measure of Manliness

The Measure of Manliness PDF Author: Karen Bourrier
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Sheds new light on the narrative importance of the disabled man in Victorian literature and culture

Villette

Villette PDF Author: Charlotte Brontë
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, Villette, is thought to be most closely modelled on her own experiences teaching in a pensionnat in Brussels, the place on which the fictional town of Villette is based. In the novel, first published in 1853, we follow the protagonist Lucy Snowe from the time she is fourteen and lives with her godmother in rural England, through her family tragedies and departure for the town of Villette where she finds work at a French boarding school. People from her past reappear in dramatic ways, she makes new connections, and she learns the stories and secrets of the people around her. Through it all, the reader is made privy to Lucy’s thoughts, feelings, and journey of self-discovery. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

The Gentleman

The Gentleman PDF Author: Forrest Leo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562656
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A funny, fantastically entertaining debut novel, in the spirit of Wodehouse and Monty Python, about a famous poet who inadvertently sells his wife to the devil--then recruits a band of adventurers to rescue her. When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they're broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him. Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil -- the polite "Gentleman" of the title -- who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party's over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord. Newly in love with Vivien, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage's spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a "dalliance." Throughout, his cousin's quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana. Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé's beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature PDF Author: Christine Berberich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131702785X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society. Twentieth-century depictions of the gentleman thus have much to tell us about rapidly changing conceptions of national, class, and gender identity.

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

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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.