Download or read book Amnesiac Selves written by Nicholas Dames and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-14 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten.
Download or read book The Amnesiac written by Sam Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping literary thriller from an exciting new voice in fiction Hailed as 'one to watch' by the UK's Telegraph, Sam Taylor is one of the most imaginative and innovative young writers at work today. With The Amnesiac, his United States debut, he incorporates a murder mystery and a forgotten manuscript into an exhilarating and intelligent novel. When twenty-nine-year-old James Purdew returns to England from his home in Amsterdam, it is to discover what happened during three earlier years of his life that he cannot recall. What he finds, in an old house with a tragic history, is a nineteenth-century manuscript that begins to seem less and less like a work of fiction-and more like the key to his own lost past. Memory and amnesia, fiction and reality, destiny and randomness, heaven and hell-all converge to form an engrossing gothic story that is sure to appeal to fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac written by Gabrielle Zevin and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Elsewhere and the Birthright trilogy, Gabrielle Zevin's Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is an imaginative YA novel all about love and second chances. If Naomi had picked tails, she would have won the coin toss. She wouldn't have had to go back for the yearbook camera, and she wouldn't have hit her head on the steps. She wouldn't have woken up in an ambulance with amnesia. She certainly would have remembered her boyfriend, Ace. She might even have remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place. She would understand why her best friend, Will, keeps calling her "Chief." She'd get all his inside jokes, and maybe he wouldn't be so frustrated with her for forgetting things she can't possibly remember. She'd know about her mom's new family. She'd know about her dad's fiancée. She wouldn't have to spend her junior year relearning all the French she supposedly knew already. She never would have met James, the boy with the questionable past and the even fuzzier future, who tells her he once wanted to kiss her. She wouldn't have wanted to kiss him back. But Naomi picked heads. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Download or read book Material Ambitions written by Rebecca Richardson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book traces the early history of the self-help genre and the literary depiction of ambition in Victorian British fiction. Stories of hardworking characters who bring themselves out of rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. In chapters featuring the works of novelists, the author demonstrates that Victorian fiction dramatized ambition and problematized it as well"--
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830 1914 written by Joanne Shattock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion in the reading public and an explosive growth in the number of books and newspapers produced to meet its demands. These specially commissioned essays examine not only the full range and variety of texts that entertained and informed the Victorians, but also the boundaries of Victorian literature: the links and overlap with Romanticism in the 1830s, and the roots of modernism in the years leading up to the First World War. The Companion demonstrates how science, medicine and theology influenced creative writing and emphasizes the importance of the visual in painting, book illustration and in technological innovations from the kaleidoscope to the cinema. Essays also chart the complex and fruitful interchanges with writers in America, Europe and the Empire, highlighting the geographical expansion of literature in English. This Companion brings together the most important aspects of this prolific and popular period of English literature.
Download or read book Still Life written by Elisha Cohn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.
Download or read book Twilight Histories written by Camilla Cassidy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twilight Histories explores how Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy mingled nostalgia with historical fiction. Nostalgia was homesickness before it was a kind of memory, making it a fitting image for the displacements in time and place brought by Victorian modernity.
Download or read book Shock Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction written by Jill L. Matus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.
Download or read book Bad Logic written by Daniel Wright and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: To give a form to formless things -- Charlotte Bronte's contradictions -- Anthony Trollope's tautologies -- George Eliot's vagueness -- Henry James's generality -- Afterword: Queer fiction and the law
Download or read book Toy Stories written by Vanessa Smith and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
Download or read book Making Sense of Suffering Theory Practice Representation written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suffering may be universal, but it is not universally understood. In this collection, scholars from many nations and disciplines explore theoretical and practical approaches to understanding suffering as well as the ethics and effects of representing suffering in art and literature.
Download or read book Dickensian Affects written by Joshua Gooch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity, Joshua Gooch argues that Dickens’s novels offer models of feeling that illuminate the dissensions that accompany life’s precariousness under capitalism. By examining the role of violence, anxiety, surprise, and suspense in Dickens’s novels, Gooch explores how they represent and shape emotions to create rhythms specific to their historical moment. To unearth Dickensian affects, Gooch examines how some of Dickens’s novels yoke elements in their difference to signal different kinds and ways of feeling, what he terms affective form. This patterning of elements links a text’s ways of feeling to its conjuncture and locates lines of flight that allow its representations of emotion to become something else. The violence of Oliver Twist links its satire of the New Poor Law to the post-abolition period of apprenticeship in the West Indies. The pervasive anxiety of The Old Curiosity Shop links Nell’s journey to arguments economic inequality focused on questions of inheritance and land reform. The surprise of David Copperfield binds its interests in questions of character and trust to Britain’s professional world and credit markets. And the suspense of Great Expectations gestures toward a sense of shame and demand for new models of masculine character also seen in the Volunteer rifle militias. Dickensian Affects argues that for Dickens, questions of feeling reveal the precarity of feeling itself. For Dickens, to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise.
Download or read book Amnesiac Selves written by Nicholas Dames and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Victorian Newsletter written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Physiology of the Novel written by Nicholas Dames and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.
Download or read book Permanent Present Tense written by Suzanne Corkin and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Permanent Present Tense Suzanne Corkin tells the incredible story of the amnesiac Henry Gustave Molaison - known only as H.M. until his death in 2008 - and what he taught medical science, neuroscience and the world. In 1953, at the age of twenty-seven, Molaison underwent an experimental psychosurgical procedure intended to alleviate his debilitating epilepsy. The outcome was devastating - when Molaison awoke he was unable to form new memories and for the rest of his life would be trapped in the moment. But Molaison's tragedy would prove a gift to humanity, illuminating functions and structures of the brain and revolutionizing the neuroscience of memory. His amnesia became a touchstone for memory impairment in other patients. For nearly five decades, distinguished neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin studied Molaison and oversaw his care. Her account of his life and legacy in Permanent Present Tense reveals an intelligent man who, despite his profound amnesia, was altruistic, friendly, open, and humorous. She explores how his case transformed an entire field, helping to address eternal questions. How do we store and retrieve memories? How do we know that there are different kinds of memory, controlled by different brain circuits? Is our identity bound up with remembering? If you can recall people or events for only a few seconds and cannot learn from the past or plan the future, can you still live a meaningful life? Permanent Present explores the astonishing complexity of the human brain with great clarity, sensitivity, and grace, showing how one man's story challenged our very notions of who we are. Suzanne Corkin is Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience and head of the Corkin Lab at MIT. The author of nine books, Corkin lives in Charlestown, Massachusetts. 'A fascinating account of perhaps the most important case study in the history of neuroscience, rich with implications for our understanding of the brain, our experience, and what it means to be human' Steven Pinker, author of 'How the Mind Works' and 'The Stuff of Thought' 'The best way to understand memory is to witness the ways it can disassemble. In this remarkable book, Suzanne Corkin gifts us with a rare insider's view, revealing how a man who could not remember his immediate past so profoundly influenced science's future' David Eagleman, neuroscientist and New York Times-bestselling author of 'Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain' 'Suzanne Corkin has written an enjoyable and sensitive story of H.M.'s life and what it has taught us about memory. Millions of patients have been the source of advances in science but few are celebrated as individuals. We learn through H.M. that 'Our brains are like hotels with eclectic arrays of guests-homes to different kinds of memory, each of which occupies its own suite of rooms' Philip A. Sharp, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 'Drawing on her unique investigations over more than four decades, neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin relates the fascinating story of how one severely amnesic man transformed our understanding of mind, brain, and memory' Howard Gardner, author of 'Multiple Intelligences'
Download or read book Associationism and the Literary Imagination written by Cairns Craig and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an account of the philosophical and psychological theories in the British empiricist tradition that provoked some of the most radical changes in literary form between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.
