The Industrial Novels

The Industrial Novels PDF Author: Mehmet Akif Balkaya
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443886572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
This book provides a clear historical and theoretical framework for reading three important novels published in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Examining the novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the book offers an analysis of their strategies for radical reforms and for the restructuring of society and politics through improvements in the living and working conditions of the working class. The Industrial Novels begins with an introduction of the Industrial Revolution, which is then followed by chapters devoted to a detailed discussion of each novel. Through this, the book explores the negative social, political and economic effects of industrialization and urbanization, as reflected in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855). As such, the book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of both literature and sociology.

The Industrial Novels

The Industrial Novels PDF Author: Mehmet Akif Balkaya
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443886572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a clear historical and theoretical framework for reading three important novels published in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Examining the novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the book offers an analysis of their strategies for radical reforms and for the restructuring of society and politics through improvements in the living and working conditions of the working class. The Industrial Novels begins with an introduction of the Industrial Revolution, which is then followed by chapters devoted to a detailed discussion of each novel. Through this, the book explores the negative social, political and economic effects of industrialization and urbanization, as reflected in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855). As such, the book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of both literature and sociology.

English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century

English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Stephen Knight
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040025889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers’ fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.

A Companion to the Victorian Novel

A Companion to the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Patrick Brantlinger
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470997206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
The Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period. Explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure, and Darwinism to those who are unfamiliar with them. Comprises original, accessible chapters written by renowned and emerging scholars in the field of Victorian studies. Ideal for students and researchers seeking up-to-the-minute coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel PDF Author: Josephine M. Guy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349249041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book describes various accounts of the Victorian social-problem novel, examining their strengths and limitations in the light of the historiographical assumptions which underlie them. An alternative historical account is offered, which focuses on the novels' intellectual milieu - specifically on mid-Victorian concepts of 'the social' and of what was understood by the term 'social problem'. In detailed readings of individual works, the book argues that an appreciation of these concepts permits new ways of understanding the contradictions identified in these works together with their apparently 'conservative' politics.

Working Fictions

Working Fictions PDF Author: Carolyn Lesjak
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.

Risk and the English Novel

Risk and the English Novel PDF Author: Julia Hoydis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311061541X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860 PDF Author: E. Courtemanche
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230304982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

Novel Machines

Novel Machines PDF Author: Joseph Drury
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192510800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife's forceps; Ann Radcliffe's gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. In Novel Machines, however, Joseph Drury argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself. Like other kinds of machine, a narrative is an artificial construction composed of different parts that combine to produce a sequence of causally linked actions. Like other machines, a narrative is designed to produce predictable effects and can therefore be put to certain uses. Such affinities had been apparent to critics since Aristotle, but they began to assume a particular urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel's narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern 'invention' that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period's moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel's narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period's most characteristic and influential formal innovations.

Black Skin, Blue Books

Black Skin, Blue Books PDF Author: Daniel G. Williams
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783162724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson’s connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison’s stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide ranging book draws on literary, historical, visual and musical sources to open up new avenues of research in Welsh and African American studies.

Industrial Gothic

Industrial Gothic PDF Author: Bridget M. Marshall
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786837722
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Transatlantic approach: This project explores British and American texts in conversation together. Use of archival materials, which is relatively unusual within Gothic studies, and even in literary studies more generally. A focus on poetry, drama, and periodical writing, genres that are often ignored in the study of the Gothic. A focus on women’s work (both on the labor of women and on texts by women). A focus on local Gothic (especially in Lowell and Manchester), with a connection to larger international trends of the genre.