How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791076784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470779853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Laura C. Berry
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813934570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Barbara Dennis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521775953
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. This book invites readers to reflect on the whole phenomenon of the Victorian novel and its role in dissecting and informing the society which produced it. The reasons for the growth of the novel and its spectacular success is also examined and discussed. Texts and extracts from a selection of Victorian novels and essays, including some material that readers will be unfamiliar with, help to provide a broader understanding of the range of Victorian fiction. Authors include: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Deirdre David
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107005132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State PDF Author: Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel

Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel PDF Author: Troy J. Bassett
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030319261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott’s popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.

Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel

Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: A. Young
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230377076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book examines class and its representation in Victorian literature, focusing on the emergence of the lower middle class and middle-class responses to it. Arlene Young analyses portraits of white-collar workers, both men and women, who laboured under disparaging misperceptions of their values, abilities, and cultural significance, and shows how these misperceptions were both formulated and resisted. The analysis includes canonical texts like Dickens's Little Dorrit and Gissing's The Odd Women as well as less well-known works by Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Amy Levy, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and May Sinclair.