Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature PDF Author: Sophie Gilmartin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521560948
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature PDF Author: Sophie Gilmartin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521560948
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel PDF Author: J. Kilroy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230604358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Through analysis of eight English novels of the Nineteenth century, this work explores the ways in which the novel contributes to the formation of ideology regarding the family, and, conversely, the ways in which changing attitudes toward the family shape and reshape the novel.

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative PDF Author: Jan-Melissa Schramm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139510835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Lucy Hartley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316878600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel PDF Author: Lauren Gillingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009296574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Jonathan Farina
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317016602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.

Selling Ancestry

Selling Ancestry PDF Author: Stéphane Jettot
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192690744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widespread commercialization across the eighteenth century. These directories replaced the expensive, locally-produced, early modern artefacts (tombs, windowpanes, illuminated pedigrees), and began to reach a wide audience of readers in the British Isles and the colonies. From the first Peerage in 1709 to the guidebooks of Debrett's and Burke's in the 1830s, Stéphane Jettot offers an insight into the cumulative process leading to the creation of these hybrid products — a combination of court almanacs, county histories, and town directories. Employed by contemporaries as reference tools to navigate through a dynamic and changing society, they could be used as a means to probe contemporary attitudes towards social status and political events. Published by the most prominent London booksellers who shared their copyrights among themselves, they relied on the considerable involvement of thousands of families in the counties. In their correspondence with publishers, many new and old elites desired to insert their own narrative into a general history of Britain by dispatching documents, quotations, and anecdotes. Based on a unique source-base, this book provides a systematic review of these directories, their production, and sale, but also their potential role in shaping the character of social change. Jettot demonstrates the wider ramifications of genealogy and its structural ability to reinvent itself, associate amateurs and antiquarians alike, and thrive on the wavering lines between facts and fiction, offering an exciting and unique insight into the social history of eighteenth-century Britain.

Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction

Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Kirby-Jane Hallum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.