Download or read book Thackeray s Skeptical Narrative and the Perilous Trade of Authorship written by Judith L. Fisher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the rhetorical work of James Phelan, Wayne Booth's ethical criticism, recent work on William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as an understanding of the role of skepticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English thought, Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the "Perilous Trade" of Authorship makes a substantial contribution to nineteenth-century reading practices, as well as narratology in general. Judith Fisher combines in this study rhetorical and ethical analysis of Thackeray's narrative techniques to trace how his fiction develops to educate his reader into what she terms a "hermeneutic of skepticism." This is a kind of poised reading which enables his readers to integrate his fiction into their life in what Thackeray called "a world without God" without becoming pessimistic or fatalistic. Although Thackeray's narrative strategies have been the subject of study, most have focused on Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond only, and none look as closely as does this study at actual rhetorical techniques such as his use of pronominalization to interpolate the reader into his skeptical discourse. Fisher also brings her analysis to bear on The Adventures of Philip and The Virginians, Thackeray's last two complete novels, both of which were critical failures even as contemporary critics acknowledged their stylistic excellence. This is the first study to attempt to understand the puzzle of those two books; Fisher recovers them from their marginalized position in Thackeray's oeuvre. Fisher expertly weaves an accessible narrative theory with thoroughgoing knowledge of Thackeray's life in an integrated reading of his entire works. Reading Thackeray holistically in spite of his own disruptive practices, she does full justice to his critical skepticism while elucidating his canon for a new readership.
Download or read book Thackeray S Skeptical Narrative and the Perilous Trade of Authorship written by Judith L. Fisher and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction written by Leila Silvana May and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life," and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.
Download or read book Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction written by Matthew Sussman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a deep history of style in theory and practice that transforms our understanding of style in the novel.
Download or read book Thackeray in Time written by Richard Salmon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intense fascination with the experience of time has long been recognised as a distinctive feature of the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863). This collection of essays, however, represents the first sustained critical examination of Thackeray's 'time consciousness' in all its varied manifestations. Encompassing the full chronological span of the author's career and a wide range of literary forms and genres in which he worked, Thackeray in Time repositions Thackeray's temporal and historical self-consciousness in relation to the broader socio-cultural contexts of Victorian modernity. The first part of the collection focusses on some of the characteristic temporal modes of professional authorship and print culture in the mid-nineteenth century, including periodical journalism and the Christmas book market. Secondly, the volume offers fresh approaches to Thackeray's acknowledged status as a major exponent of historical fiction, reconsidering questions of historiography and the representation of place in such novels as Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. The final part of the collection develops the central Thackerayan theme of memory within four very different but complementary contexts. Thackeray's absorption by memories of childhood in later life leads on to his own subsequent memorialisation by familial descendants and to the potential of digital technology for preserving and enhancing Thackeray's print archive in the future, and finally to the critical legacy perpetuated by generations of literary scholars since his death.
Download or read book Fatherhood Authority and British Reading Culture 1831 1907 written by Melissa Shields Jenkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.
Download or read book The Invisible Hand and British Fiction 1818 1860 written by E. Courtemanche and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.
Download or read book Vanity Fair written by William Makepeace Thackeray and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I ran to the side of the ship. Help, help! Murder! I screamed, and my uncle slowly turned to look at me. I did not see any more. Already strong hands were pulling me away. Then something hit my head; I saw a great flash of fire, and fell to the ground . . .' And so begin David Balfour's adventures. He is kidnapped, taken to sea, and meets many dangers. He also meets a friend, Alan Breck. But Alan is in danger himself, on the run from the English army across the wild Highlands of Scotland . . .
Download or read book Lives of Victorian Literary Figures Part V Volume 3 written by Ralph Pite and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the reputations and biographical portrayal of three innovative and controversial writers: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Thackeray. These anthologies of contemporary biographical material shed light on the processes at work in the establishment of a public image and a critical reputation.
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 Authorship in Context written by K. Hadjiafxendi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-03-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theories of authorship and material culture provide the framework for this study. It maps Anglo-American authorship as it shifts from a theoretical to a more material approach to its study in contexts recognized as key to its development: the nineteenth-century literary market-place, twentieth-century experimentalism and postmodern culture.
Download or read book Author Fictions written by Ingo Berensmeyer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictional novelists and other author characters have been a staple of novels and stories from the early nineteenth century onwards. What is it that attracts authors to representing their own kind in fiction? Author Fictions addresses this question from a theoretical and historical perspective. Narrative representations of literary authorship not only reflect the aesthetic convictions and social conditions of their actual authors or their time; they also take an active part in negotiating and shaping these conditions. The book unfolds the history of such ‘author fictions’ in European and North American texts since the early nineteenth century as a literary history of literary authorship, ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction. It combines rhetorical and sociological approaches to answer the question how literature makes authors. Identifying ‘author fictions’ as narratives that address the fragile material conditions of literary creation in the actual and symbolic economies of production, Ingo Berensmeyer explores how these texts elaborate and manipulate concepts and models of authorship. This book will be relevant to English, American and comparative literary studies and to anyone interested in the topic of literary authorship.
Download or read book The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession written by Richard Salmon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating study into the development of the Victorian literary profession that examines literary and visual representations of authorship.
Download or read book Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography written by Heidi L. Pennington and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.
Download or read book At Vanity Fair written by Kirsty Milne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Vanity Fair tells the story of Bunyan's powerful metaphor, exploring how Vanity Fair was transformed from an emblem of sin and persecution into a showcase for celebrity, wealth and power. This literary history, focusing on reception, adaptation and influence, traces the fictional representation of Vanity Fair over three centuries from John Bunyan's masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), to William Makepeace Thackeray's own Vanity Fair (1847–8). It explores the influence of anonymous journalists and booksellers alongside well-known authors including Ben Jonson, Samuel Richardson and Thomas Carlyle. Over time, Bunyan's dystopian fantasy has been altered and repurposed to characterise consumer capitalism, channelling memories that inform and unsettle modern hedonism. By tracking the idea of 'Vanity Fair' against this shifting background, the book illuminates the relationship between the individual and the collective imagination, between what is culturally available and what is creatively impelled.
Download or read book Reading the Nineteenth century Novel written by Alison Case and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2008 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jane Austen's Persuasion to George Eliot's Middlemarch, the nineteenth century marks the rise of the novel as the dominant form of Western literature. This engaging text offers readers a close analysis of novels that are uniquely representative of the time period, including the work of Austen, Eliot, Scott, Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Trollope, Braddon, and the Brontë sisters. An indispensable resource for students and teachers alike, this accessible guidebook: Places strong emphasis on the distinctive perspectives and discursive practices of narrators Provides in-depth analyses of individual passages Highlights the differences between the assumptions and experiences of the era in which the novels were written and those of the modern reader Draws key distinctions between novelists Explores significant theoretical approaches such as Foucauldian, New Historicist, Postcolonial, and feminist criticism Offers an overview of the social, economic, and political change that was influenced by the fiction of the time.
Download or read book Chaucer Illustrated written by William Kirkland Finley and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chaucer Illustrated presents ten scholarly essays, specifically commissioned for this volume, that collectively trace pictorial renditions of The Canterbury Tales from the Ellesmere Manuscript (c. 1410) to the 20th-century illustrations of Rockwell Kent and Eric Gill. The contributors address the way the illustrations illuminate the history of book production, marketing, and readership; and the writers also consider how artists have interpreted Chaucer's text."--BOOK JACKET.
