Download or read book Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism written by Daniel Brown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the historical moment when writers and critics first used the term “realism” to describe representation in literature and painting. While scholarship on realism tends to proceed from an assumption that the term has a long-established meaning and history, this book reveals that mid-nineteenth-century critics and writers first used the term reluctantly, with much confusion over what it might actually mean. It did not acquire the ready meaning we now take for granted until the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, its first definitions came primarily by way of example and analogy, through descriptions of current practitioners, or through fictionalized representations of artists. By investigating original debates over the term “realism,” this book shows how writers simultaneously engaged with broader concerns about the changing meanings of what was real and who had the authority to decide this.
Download or read book Victorian Negatives written by Susan E. Cook and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation. Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book’s focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture. “This is a fascinating and extremely specific discussion of the ways in which photography, more precisely negative technology, was ‘culturally embedded’ in the Victorian era. It is this precision that makes the book most compelling; as Cook herself notes, most literary scholars treat photography as a monolithic whole, but she offers a welcome specificity.” — Antonia Losano, author of The Victorian Painter in Victorian Literature
Download or read book Worlds Enough written by Elaine Freedgood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.
Download or read book Victorian Skin written by Pamela K. Gilbert and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts written by Claire Wood and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.
Download or read book The Science of Character written by S. Pearl Brilmyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--
Download or read book The Realistic Imagination written by George Levine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free.
Download or read book Reading Victorian Fiction written by Andrew Blake and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-03 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the interrelationship of the Victorian novel with other forms of writings, arguing that the whole literary culture was concerned with the production of Victorian values, including novels, an active part in the compromise between aristocratic and middle class cultures in this period.
Download or read book The Victorian Novel written by Francis O'Gorman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.
Download or read book The Literature of the Victorian Era written by Hugh Walker and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 1114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victorian Fiction as a Bildungsroman written by Petru Golban and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphorically speaking, the nineteenth-century English Bildungsroman, dealing with the principle of identity formation, parallels Victorian fiction as a whole, revealing the completion of its own formation, which began in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the most important and popular Victorian novels are Bildungsromane, in which authors construct or rather reconstruct their own life experiences as formative processes. This book shows that the Bildungsroman has a development history, is a specific literary system, and consists of a thematic and narrative pattern. It details the entrance of this newly established fictional tradition into Victorian culture and literature through Carlyle’s threefold literary reception of the novel of formation and its subsequent flourishing and complexity. In this respect, a number of novelistic works are scrutinized, and each faces the question as to whether its thematic and narrative perspectives fit the pattern and shape of the Bildungsroman.
Download or read book The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real written by Audrey Jaffe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical discussions of the Victorian realist novel tend to focus on its vivid representations of everyday life. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real proposes that the genre is founded in desire, moving the novels not towards a shared reality but rather toward distinct fantasies: dreams of the real. Rather than simply redefine Victorian realism or propose a new canon for it, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real argues that the real is inevitably, for the Victorian realist novel, an object of desire: what the novel seeks to capture and represent. A novel's construction of the real is therefore inseparable from its fantasy of the real--a formulation Audrey Jaffe refers to as "realist fantasy." One way in which this simultaneity manifests itself is that the conventions novels frequently use to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies overlap with those each novel uses to create its realist effects. In new readings of Victorian novels (including Eliot's Adam Bede, Dickens's Oliver Twist, Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native, Trollope's Orley Farm, and Wilkie Collins's Armadale), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real demonstrates that one of the signal effects of this overlapping is Victorian realism's construction of the real as an object of readerly desire. Jaffe shows that realism and fantasy in the Victorian realist novel are not opposed, but rather occupy the same space and are shaped by the same conventions. Revisiting and reconsidering key elements of realist novel theory (including metonymy; the insignificant detail; character interiority; the representation of everyday life and the idea of disillusionment), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real also uncovers and anatomizes representational strategies unique to each text.
Download or read book The Early and Mid Victorian Novel written by David Skilton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian period was the age of the novel and critics at the time clearly saw the importance of prose fiction. First published in 1993, this anthology contains over fifty original extracts from contemporary critics on the early and mid-Victorian novel. Arranged thematically, the volume covers such topics as literary form, the social responsibility of literature, issues of politics and gender, the influence of criticism, realism, plot and characterisation, imagination and creativity, and the office and social standing of the novelist. The introductions and notes draw together the large number of voices and guide the reader through the Victorian literary critical debate. This accessible and invaluable guide will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature.
Download or read book Victorian Criticism of the Novel written by Edwin M. Eigner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-11-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the nineteenth century the novel unquestionably had become the most popular and influential of English literary forms. Yet it has not always been clear how the Victorians themselves regarded the nature of prose fiction. This volume is a collection of twelve 'landmark' essays that chart the development of English theories of fiction during the great age of the novel. Spanning the whole of the Victorian period, from Bulwer Lytton's 'On Art in Fiction' (1838) to Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), the volume also includes pieces by George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a number of the more important critics and reviewers of the time. The editors' introduction surveys the main issues, such as the debate between realism and romance, addressed by novel criticism throughout the period. Each of the selections that follow is set in its historical context by a prefatory essay and is fully annotated for the student. There is a helpful bibliography of further reading.
Download or read book The Nineteenth century Novel written by Delia da Sousa Correa and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the scope and variety of the great novels of the 19th century. The essays in this collection trace the experimentation of 19th-century writers in advancing new modes of realist fiction.
Download or read book Victorian Literature written by David Amigoni and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were the genres of literature changed by new methods of serialization and publishing? How did a widespread culture of performance emerge in the period to shape as well as to be shaped by the novel and poetry? David Amigoni draws on the most recent critical approaches to the novel, Victorian melodrama and poetry to answer these and other questions. The work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle and Mathew Arnold are explored in relation to ideas about fiction, journalism, drama, poetry, the New Woman, gothic, horror and the Victorian stage.
Download or read book Victorian Literature written by Lee Behlman and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates offers a comprehensive introduction to the critical debates about Victorian Literature, addressing the most popular and engaging topics in the field today.
