The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel

Author: Daniel Hack
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923451
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.

How to Read the Victorian Novel

Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

The Victorian Novel

Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470779853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Victorian Novel

Author: Barbara Dennis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521775953
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. This book invites readers to reflect on the whole phenomenon of the Victorian novel and its role in dissecting and informing the society which produced it. The reasons for the growth of the novel and its spectacular success is also examined and discussed. Texts and extracts from a selection of Victorian novels and essays, including some material that readers will be unfamiliar with, help to provide a broader understanding of the range of Victorian fiction. Authors include: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm.

The Victorian Novel

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791076784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199533148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 829

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

Author: Deirdre David
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107005132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel

Author: Troy J. Bassett
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030319261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott’s popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State

Author: Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

Worlds Enough

Author: Elaine Freedgood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
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.