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 198 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 Victorian Skin written by Pamela K. Gilbert and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 584 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 Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel written by Timothy Gao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles.
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 Realism Ethics and Secularism written by George Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.
Download or read book The Antinomies Of Realism written by Fredric Jameson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
Download or read book Victorian Criticism of the Novel written by Edwin M. Eigner and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1985-11-07 with total page 272 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 Literary Channel written by Margaret Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clichés, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Françoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot written by George Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays is comprehensively, scholarly and lucidly written, and at the same time offers original insights into the work of one of the most important Victorian novelists, and into her complex and often scandalous career.
Download or read book Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism written by Franklin Verzelius Newton Painter and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elementary Guide To Literary Criticism Painter written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modern Realism in English Canadian Fiction written by Colin Hill and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the scholarship on twentieth-century Canadian literature has argued that English-Canadian fiction was plagued by backwardness and an inability to engage fully with the movement of modernism that was so prevalent in British and American fiction and poetry. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction re-evaluates Canadian literary culture to posit that it has been misunderstood because it is a distinct genre, a regional form of the larger international modernist movement. Examining literary magazines, manifestos, archival documents, and major writers such as Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, and Raymond Knister, Colin Hill identifies a 'modern realism' that crosses regions as well as urban and rural divides. A bold reading of the modern-realist aesthetic and an articulate challenge to several enduring and limiting myths about Canadian writing, Modern Realism in English- Canadian Fiction will stimulate important debate in literary circles everywhere.
Download or read book Realism s Others written by Eva Aldea and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness, and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However, the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume all demonstrate. Realism’s Others examines the various strategies by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity, epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this collection examine in detail not just the fact of otherness in some canonical realist and canonical magical-realist and postmodern novels, but the actual means by which that otherness is established by the text. These essays suggest that neither realist narrative nor narratives positioned as anti-realist take otherness for granted; rather, the texts discussed here actively create difference, and this creation of difference often occasions severe difficulties for the novels’ representational schema. How does one represent different types of knowledge, other aesthetic modes or other spaces, for example, in texts whose epistemology has long been seen as secular and empirical, whose aesthetic mode has always been approached as pure descriptive mimesis, and whose settings are largely domestic? These essays all begin with a certain collision—of nationalities, of classes, of representational matrices, of religions—and go on to chart the challenges that this collision presents to our ideas or stereotypes of realism, or to the possibilities of writing against and beyond realism. This question motivates examination of key realist or social-realist texts, in some of these essays, by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Franz Grillparzer, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, H. T. Tsiang, Alan Sillitoe, and Richard Yates. However, it is no less central a question in certain non-realist texts which engage realist aims to a surprising degree, often to debate them openly; some of these essays discuss, in this light, fantastic, magical realist, and postmodern works by Abram Tertz, Paul Auster, Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and A. S. Byatt. Realism becomes more than an aesthetic aim or narrative mode. It becomes, rather, a value evoked and discussed by all of the works analyzed here, in order to reveal its impact on fiction’s treatment of ethnicity, nationality, ideology, space, gender, and social class.
