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' argues that Victorian novelistic realism is a product of the Victorians' overarching desire, both cultural and ideological, for the real. What the book calls 'realist fantasy' describes the way in which the conventions used to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies also shape the more general and generalized fantasy that constitutes each particular novel's imagining of the real.

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' argues that Victorian novelistic realism is a product of the Victorians' overarching desire, both cultural and ideological, for the real. What the book calls 'realist fantasy' describes the way in which the conventions used to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies also shape the more general and generalized fantasy that constitutes each particular novel's imagining of the real.

Still Life

Still Life PDF Author: Elisha Cohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190250046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.

The Great Victorian Collection

The Great Victorian Collection PDF Author: Brian Moore
Publisher: London ; Toronto : Paladin Grafton Books
ISBN: 9780586087381
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description


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.

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Noa Reich
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666938378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction’s engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels’ concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels’ self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers’ expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction’s mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.

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.

Sensation Fiction and Modernity

Sensation Fiction and Modernity PDF Author: James Aaron Green
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031498348
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description


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.

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.

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.