Download or read book Victorian Biography Reconsidered written by Juliette Atkinson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939, Virginia Woolf called for a more inclusive form of biography, which would include 'the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious'. She did so in part as a reaction against Victorian biography, deemed to have been overly preoccupied with 'Great Men'. Yet a significant number of Victorians had already broken ranks to write the lives of humble, unsuccessful, or neglected men and women. Victorian Biography Reconsidered seeks to uncover and assess this trend. The book begins with an overview of Victorian biography followed by a reflection on how the bagginess of nineteenth-century hero-worship enabled new subjects to emerge. Biographies of 'hidden' lives are then scrutinized through chapters on the lives of humble naturalists, failed destinies, minor women writers, neglected Romantic poets rescued by Victorian biographers, and, finally, the Dictionary of National Biography. In its conclusion, the book briefly discusses how Virginia Woolf absorbed earlier biographical trends before redirecting the representation of 'hidden' lives. Victorian Biography Reconsidered argues that, often paradoxically, nineteenth-century biographers regarded the public sphere with intense wariness. At a time of instability for men of letters, biographers embraced the role of mediators in a manner that asserted their own cultural authority. Frequently, they showed little interest in vouchsafing immortality for their unknown or forgotten subjects, but strove instead to provoke amongst their readers a feeling of gratitude for the hidden labour that sustained the nation and an appreciation for the writers who had brought it to their attention.
Download or read book Victorian Biography Reconsidered written by Juliette Atkinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of numerous biographies, from the lives of working-class scientists to minor women writers, Victorian Biography Reconsidered examines how and why nineteenth-century biographers challenged the contemporary obsession with 'Great Men' and brought to public attention the lives of neglected or unknown men and women.
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 Victorian Biography written by Ira Bruce Nadel and published by Dissertations-G. This book was released on 1986 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victorians Undone written by Kathryn Hughes and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Virginia Woolf and the Victorians written by Steve Ellis and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Ellis challenges the idea of Woolf as a modernist, arguing instead that she is more 'post-Victorian' in her writing. In addition, he untangles the complex ideas of progress and reaction to Wolf's work and traces textual evidence of her thinking about history, past and present.
Download or read book Eminent Victorians written by Giles Lytton Strachey and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey. It consists of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon.
Download or read book Better Left Unsaid written by Nora Gilbert and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Better Left Unsaid is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—this book reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a "censored" commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, Nora Gilbert explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.
Download or read book Eminent Victorians written by Lytton Strachey and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-11-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey, consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had until then been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon (although Nightingale is actually praised and her reputation was enhanced). The book shows its other subjects in a less than flattering light; for instance, the intrigues of Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman.
Download or read book French Novels and the Victorians written by Juliette Atkinson and published by British Academy Monographs. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La jaquette indique : "In 1836 John Wilson Croker, having immersed himself in dozens of contemporary French novels, warned that 'she who dares to read a single page of the hundred thousand licentious pages with which the last five years have indundated society, is lost for ever.' Many readers, both then and during the following decades, were nonetheless willing to take the risk. it has become common to oppose prudish Victorian England with permissive nineteenth-century France, but the extent to which Gallic literature was rejected has been greatly exaggerated. French Novels and the Victorians sets out to trace the fortunes of French fiction in England between 1830 and 1870. The book explores the institutions, businesses, publications and networks that enabled French novels to cross the Channel and reach British hands. The works' dissemination was sufficiently extensive to cause alarm, and the notion of their immorality was subjected to scrutiny in transnational critical discussions, readers' responses, censorship debates and fictional representations. the impact of French novels was, however, by no means considered simply in moral terms, but also in literary and even commercial ones, as the pervasiveness of these imports challenged the boundaries and identity of England's national literature. In addition to assessing the cultural importance of novelests such as Balzac, Dumas, Dumas fils, Hugo, Sans and Sue, and recovering the significance of currently neglected writers sur as Paul de Kock, French novels and the Victorians seeks to investigate how critics, novelists, and readers elaborated and responded to the concept of 'the French novel'."
Download or read book Parallel Lives written by Phyllis Rose and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1984-10-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature written by Dennis Denisoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.
Download or read book Parnell Reconsidered written by Donal McCartney and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by leading scholars and Parnell experts reconsiders Charles Stewart Parnell and the Parnell family legacy in the context of the late nineteenth century and in relation to the development of Irish politics and society in that period. Among the questions reconsidered are what Parnell understood by Home Rule; his attitude to separatism and his position in the nationalist spectrum; his extraordinary relationship with Gladstone; the context and significance of his famous ne plus ultra speech delivered at Cork in January 1885 and his defiant manifesto 'To the Irish people', issued after the O'Shea divorce scandal; and the role of the United Ireland newspaper in his career and his sometimes troubled relationship with the Press generally. New and revealing perspectives are offered on Parnell's attitude to religion; the impact of scandal on his career and reputation; the telling of national myth and the challenge to male authority presented by Anna Parnell and the Ladies Land League; the role of Paris in Parnell family history; and the part played by the drink trade in the nationalist movement and Parnell's skilful response to conflicting demands in this area.These essays, delivered at the Parnell Spring Day and other recent events, show that Parnell is a subject that still evokes curiosity and intrigue.This current volume of essays will appeal to the general history enthusiast and the dedicated scholar alike.
Download or read book Neo Victorian Biofiction written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.
Download or read book Madness and the Romantic Poet written by James Whitehead and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?
Download or read book Jane Austen and the Victorian Heroine written by Cheryl A. Wilson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the figure of the Victorian heroine as a lens through which to examine Jane Austen’s presence in Victorian critical and popular writings. Aimed at Victorianist readers and scholars, the book focuses on the ways in which Austen was constructed in fiction, criticism, and biography over the course of the nineteenth century. For the Victorians, Austen became a kind of cultural shorthand, representing a distant, yet not too-distant, historical past that the Victorians both drew on and defined themselves against with regard to such topics as gender, literature, and national identity. Austen influenced the development of the Victorian literary heroine, and when cast as a heroine herself, was deployed in debates about the responsibilities of the novelist and the ability of fiction to shape social and cultural norms. Thus, the study is as much, if not more, about the Victorians than it is about Jane Austen.
Download or read book A Companion to Literary Biography written by Richard Bradford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative review of literary biography covering the seventeenth century to the twentieth century A Companion to Literary Biography offers a comprehensive account of literary biography spanning the history of the genre across three centuries. The editor – an esteemed literary biographer and noted expert in the field – has encouraged contributors to explore the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the writing of biographies of writers. The text examines how biographers have dealt with the lives of classic authors from Chaucer to contemporary figures such as Kingsley Amis. The Companion brings a new perspective on how literary biography enables the reader to deal with the relationship between the writer and their work. Literary biography is the most popular form of writing about writing, yet it has been largely neglected in the academic community. This volume bridges the gap between literary biography as a popular genre and its relevance for the academic study of literature. This important work: Allows the author of a biography to be treated as part of the process of interpretation and investigates biographical reading as an important aspect of criticism Examines the birth of literary biography at the close of the seventeenth century and considers its expansion through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries Addresses the status and writing of literary biography from numerous perspectives and with regard to various sources, methodologies and theories Reviews the ways in which literary biography has played a role in our perception of writers in the mainstream of the English canon from Chaucer to the present day Written for students at the undergraduate level, through postgraduate and doctoral levels, as well as academics, A Companion to Literary Biography illustrates and accounts for the importance of the literary biography as a vital element of criticism and as an index to our perception of literary history.
