Download or read book English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850 1914 written by Will Abberley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian science changed language from a tool into a natural phenomenon, evolving independently of its speakers. Will Abberley explores how science and fiction interacted in imagining different stories of language evolution. Popular narratives of language progress clashed with others of decay and degeneration. Furthermore, the blurring of language evolution with biological evolution encouraged Victorians to re-imagine language as a mixture of social convention and primordial instinct. Abberley argues that fiction by authors such as Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells not only reflected these intellectual currents, but also helped to shape them. Genres from utopia to historical romance supplied narrative models for generating thought experiments in the possible pasts and futures of language. Equally, fiction that explored the instinctive roots of language intervened in debates about language standardisation and scientific objectivity. These textual readings offer new perspectives on twenty-first-century discussions about language evolution and the language of science.
Download or read book English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850 1914 written by Will Abberley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, from primordial noise to modern English.
Download or read book Dickens s Idiomatic Imagination written by Peter J. Capuano and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.
Download or read book Decadence written by Alex Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of cinema on Decadence, and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde.
Download or read book Scale Crisis and the Modern Novel written by Aaron Rosenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-09 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Download or read book The Political Lives of Victorian Animals written by Anna Feuerstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.
Download or read book Convalescence in the Nineteenth Century Novel written by Hosanna Krienke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.
Download or read book The Art of the Reprint written by Rosalind Parry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader.
Download or read book Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages written by Eavan O'Dochartaigh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.
Download or read book Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel written by Adam Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Views the Victorian novel through the prism of literary imitations that it inspired.
Download or read book Birdsong Speech and Poetry written by Francesca Mackenney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.
Download or read book The Divine in the Commonplace written by Amy M. King and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how natural theology features in both early Victorian natural histories and English provincial realist novels of the same period.
Download or read book Poetry Media and the Material Body written by Ashley Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Romantic fascination with hallucinatory poetics to the turn-of-the-century mania for automatic writing, poetry in nineteenth-century Britain appears at crucial times to be oddly involuntary, out of the control of its producers and receivers alike. This elegant study addresses the question of how people understood those forms of written creativity that seem to occur independently of the writer's will. Through the study of the century's media revolutions, evolving theories of physiology, and close readings of the works of nineteenth-century poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, Ashley Miller articulates how poetry was imagined to promote involuntary bodily responses in both authors and readers, and how these responses enlist the body as a medium that does not produce poetry but rather reproduces it. This is a poetics that draws attention to, rather than effaces, the mediacy of the body in the processes of composition and reception.
Download or read book The Art of Uncertainty written by Daniel Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Williams shows how, in a profoundly numerical age, Victorian novels imagined thought and action in the face of uncertainty.
Download or read book Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture written by Will Abberley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.
Download or read book Autobiography Sensation and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative written by Sean Grass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
Download or read book Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth Century British Novel written by Lauren Gillingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauren Gillingham reveals how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel in nineteenth-century Britain.
