The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real PDF Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190269936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real presents a new interpretation of the Victorian realist novel based on realism's desire for the real. In provocative readings of novels by Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, and Collins, Jaffe redefines realist conventions and reinterprets long-held theories about realist representation.

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real PDF Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190269936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real presents a new interpretation of the Victorian realist novel based on realism's desire for the real. In provocative readings of novels by Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, and Collins, Jaffe redefines realist conventions and reinterprets long-held theories about realist representation.

When Fiction Feels Real

When Fiction Feels Real PDF Author: Elaine Auyoung
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190845481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Why do readers claim that fictional worlds feel real? How can certain literary characters seem capable of leading lives of their own, outside the stories in which they appear? What makes the experience of reading a novel uniquely pleasurable and what do readers lose when this experience comes to an end? Since their first publication, nineteenth-century realist novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina have inspired readers to describe literary experience as gaining access to vibrant fictional worlds and becoming friends with fictional characters. While this effect continues to be central to the experience of reading realist fiction and later works in this tradition, the capacity for novels to evoke persons and places in a reader's mind has often been taken for granted and even dismissed as a naive phenomenon unworthy of critical attention. When Fiction Feels Real provides literary studies with new tools for thinking about the phenomenology of reading by bringing narrative techniques into conversation with psychological research on reading and cognition. Through close readings of classic novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, and the elegies of Thomas Hardy, Elaine Auyoung reveals what nineteenth-century writers know about how reading works. Building on well-established research on the mind, Auyoung exposes the underpinnings of the seemingly impossible achievement of realist fiction, introducing new perspectives on narrative theory, mimesis, and fictionality. When Fiction Feels Real changes the way we think about literary language, realist aesthetics, and the reading process, opening up a new field of inquiry centered on the relationship between fictional representation and comprehension.

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries PDF Author: Isabelle Hervouet
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785277545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

Frankenstein Dreams

Frankenstein Dreams PDF Author: Michael Sims
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632860422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
From Mary Shelley to H.G. Wells, a collection of the best Victorian science fiction from Michael Sims, the editor of Dracula's Guest. Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era. In Frankenstein Dreams, Michael Sims has gathered many of the very finest stories, some by classic writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells, but many that will surprise general readers. Dark visions of the human psyche emerge in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Monarch of Dreams," while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman provides a glimpse of “the fifth dimension” in her provocative tale "The Hall Bedroom.' With contributions by Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Fuller, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others, each introduced by Michael Sims, whose elegant introduction provides valuable literary and historical context, Frankenstein Dreams is a treasure trove of stories known and rediscovered.

Victorian Metafiction

Victorian Metafiction PDF Author: Tabitha Sparks
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394872X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Critics agree in the abstract that "metafiction" refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners. From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de siècle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. Victorian Metafiction reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots. Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader’s attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.

Novel-Poetry

Novel-Poetry PDF Author: Emily Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198929226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel--a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain's nineteenth century--to make a larger claim about the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The volume uncovers trajectories of literary influence that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect and narrative-driven ways of approaching time and possibility. Novel-Poetry tracks an alternative way of thinking about time and event that was inspired by the French Revolution, popularized by Lord Byron, and explored by experimental Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. The volume turns to the work of philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Slavoj %Zi%zek to theorize this alternative mode, which it aligns with the "futur antérieur." The temporality of the future anterior disrupts both the novel's realist chronologies and the expressivist lyric's cult of "the moment," thus liberating possibilities for collective action. Ranging widely across romantic lyric poetry, Victorian novels, and nineteenth-century and contemporary literary theory, Novel-Poetry asks, what alternative structures and temporalities does a focus on either realistic narrative or the lyric moment occlude? Are there ways of thinking about lived experience and personal or collective agency that do not conform to traditional models, ways that the verse-novel might help us to explore? What might be gained today from trying to think about ourselves and our world outside of established frameworks that are now so naturalized as to feel almost inescapable? This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

Plots: Literary Form and Conspiracy Culture

Plots: Literary Form and Conspiracy Culture PDF Author: Ben Carver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000475611
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their ‘readers’ situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature. This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel PDF Author: Charlotte Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019259981X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another', wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the 'real' of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James's account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence, and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how--or if--we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices--a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as 'synthetic realism'. In new readings of Edwardian novels including Conrad's Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells's Tono-Bungay, and Ford's The Good Soldier, this volume revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory--metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity--to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel's imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualization of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.

Charlotte Mary Yonge

Charlotte Mary Yonge PDF Author: Clare Walker Gore
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031106725
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the life and work of Charlotte M. Yonge, a highly influential and popular nineteenth-century writer who is emerging from a long period of critical neglect. Its wide-ranging chapters capture the scope and quality of current work in Yonge studies, addressing the full range of her prolific literary output from her best-selling novels to her nature writing, biographies, and letters. Considering themes from gender, disability, and empire, to Tractarianism, secularism, and the idea of progress, these essays consider how Yonge reflected and shaped the tastes, ideas and anxieties of her readers and contemporaries. Exploring her key role in the Anglican revival, her importance as a test case in the development of feminist criticism, and her formal innovativeness as a novelist, this collection places Yonge centrally in the nineteenth-century literary landscape and demonstrates her ongoing relevance to scholars and students of the period.

The Obsolete Empire

The Obsolete Empire PDF Author: Philip Tsang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421441373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them. Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan. By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today.