Author: James Buzard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.
Disorienting Fiction
Author: James Buzard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.
Leading in DisOrienting Times
Author: Gary V Nelson
Publisher: Christian Board of Publication
ISBN: 0827221789
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
Jack Mezirow, a leader in education theory, suggests that all transformative learning begins with a 'disorienting dilemma': an idea or experience that challenges or shifts fundamental values and assumptions. Gary Nelson and Peter Dickens, pastors and teachers with vast experience working with congregations and organizations, believe it is time for Christian leaders to be 'disoriented,' for the fundamental values and assumptions of Christian leadership to be reframed and broken down so they can see the leadership task in new ways. Blending current literature from both Christian and secular scholarship with individual and organizational examples, Leading in DisOrienting Times provides support for the concept of servant leadership that may be initially disorienting, but is ultimately liberating.
Publisher: Christian Board of Publication
ISBN: 0827221789
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Book Description
Jack Mezirow, a leader in education theory, suggests that all transformative learning begins with a 'disorienting dilemma': an idea or experience that challenges or shifts fundamental values and assumptions. Gary Nelson and Peter Dickens, pastors and teachers with vast experience working with congregations and organizations, believe it is time for Christian leaders to be 'disoriented,' for the fundamental values and assumptions of Christian leadership to be reframed and broken down so they can see the leadership task in new ways. Blending current literature from both Christian and secular scholarship with individual and organizational examples, Leading in DisOrienting Times provides support for the concept of servant leadership that may be initially disorienting, but is ultimately liberating.
Disorientation
Author: Ian Williams
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609457404
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 173
Book Description
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2021: “Lyrical, closely observed” essays on being Black in the US, Canada, and Trinidad, and how those experiences differed (Kirkus Reviews). Finalist for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Scotiabank Giller Award winner Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Spurred by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from that of US writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of “only”). He brings these formative experiences fruitfully to bear on his theme in Disorientation. Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such matters as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person’s smile; and blame culture—or how do we make meaningful change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. Disorientation is a book for all readers who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Employing his wit, his empathy for all, and his vast and astonishing gift for language, Ian Williams gives readers an open, candid, and personal perspective on an undeniably important subject. “Honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny.” —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609457404
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 173
Book Description
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2021: “Lyrical, closely observed” essays on being Black in the US, Canada, and Trinidad, and how those experiences differed (Kirkus Reviews). Finalist for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Scotiabank Giller Award winner Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Spurred by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from that of US writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of “only”). He brings these formative experiences fruitfully to bear on his theme in Disorientation. Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such matters as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person’s smile; and blame culture—or how do we make meaningful change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past. Disorientation is a book for all readers who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Employing his wit, his empathy for all, and his vast and astonishing gift for language, Ian Williams gives readers an open, candid, and personal perspective on an undeniably important subject. “Honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny.” —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes
Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable
Author: Sarah C Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317316800
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317316800
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.
A Companion to the English Novel
Author: Stephen Arata
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119068274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511
Book Description
This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day. Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119068274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511
Book Description
This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day. Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research
Novel Institutions
Author: Mullen Mary L. Mullen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474453279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realismOffers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporalityOutlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novelsReassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutionsContains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realismAdvances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialismThis book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474453279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realismOffers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporalityOutlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novelsReassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutionsContains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realismAdvances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialismThis book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.
Scott's Shadow
Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.
Victorian Vulgarity
Author: Susan David Bernstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351875833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351875833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.
Populating the Novel
Author: Emily Steinlight
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501710729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
Introduction : the biopolitical imagination -- Populating solitude : Malthus, the masses, and the romantic subject -- Political animals : the Victorian city, demography, and the politics of creaturely life -- Dickens's supernumeraries -- The sensation novel and the redundant woman questions -- "Because we are too menny
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501710729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
Introduction : the biopolitical imagination -- Populating solitude : Malthus, the masses, and the romantic subject -- Political animals : the Victorian city, demography, and the politics of creaturely life -- Dickens's supernumeraries -- The sensation novel and the redundant woman questions -- "Because we are too menny
Global Dickens
Author: Nirshan Perera
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 559
Book Description
This volume of essays provides a selection of leading contemporary scholarship which situates Dickens in a global perspective. The articles address four main areas: Dickens's reception outside Britain and North America; his intertextual relations with and influence upon writers from different parts of the world; Dickens as traveller; and the presence throughout his fiction and journalism of subjects, such as race and empire, that extend beyond the national contexts in which his work is usually considered. Written by leading researchers from diverse countries and cultures, this is an indispensable reference work in the field of Dickens studies.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 559
Book Description
This volume of essays provides a selection of leading contemporary scholarship which situates Dickens in a global perspective. The articles address four main areas: Dickens's reception outside Britain and North America; his intertextual relations with and influence upon writers from different parts of the world; Dickens as traveller; and the presence throughout his fiction and journalism of subjects, such as race and empire, that extend beyond the national contexts in which his work is usually considered. Written by leading researchers from diverse countries and cultures, this is an indispensable reference work in the field of Dickens studies.