The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351191853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
"The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as 'copies' of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination - which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as 'doubles' of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honorede Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide."

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351191853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book

Book Description
"The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as 'copies' of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination - which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as 'doubles' of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honorede Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide."

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction PDF Author: Rae Greiner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421407450
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book

Book Description
British realist novelists of the nineteenth century viewed sympathy not as a feeling but as a form of imaginative thinking useful in constructing their fiction. Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Roman Alexander Barton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110625318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Landscapes of Realism

Landscapes of Realism PDF Author: Dirk Göttsche
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 834

Get Book

Book Description
Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac PDF Author: Owen Heathcote
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107066476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
Leading specialists shed new light on key narrative and thematic features of the writings of Honoré de Balzac.

Architecture, Travellers and Writers

Architecture, Travellers and Writers PDF Author: Anne Hultzsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351575899
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
Does the way in which buildings are looked at, and made sense of, change over the course of time? How can we find out about this? By looking at a selection of travel writings spanning four centuries, Anne Hultzsch suggests that it is language, the description of architecture, which offers answers to such questions. The words authors use to transcribe what they see for the reader to re-imagine offer glimpses at modes of perception specific to one moment, place and person. Hultzsch constructs an intriguing patchwork of local and often fragmentary narratives discussing texts as diverse as the 17th-century diary of John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and an 1855 art guide by Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Further authors considered include 17th-century collector John Bargrave, 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, critic John Ruskin as well as the 20th-century architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Anne Hultzsch teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism PDF Author: Paul Hamilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191064971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 750

Get Book

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism focuses on the period beginning with the French Revolution and extending to the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. It brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The volume begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish amongst others. Then follows a second section based on the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, encapsulated by the different discourses with which writers of the time, set up an internal comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of understanding, and the Enlightenment encyclopaedic project. Discourses typically push their individual claims to resume European culture, collaborating and trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featuring here are history, geography, drama, theology, language, geography, philosophy, political theory, the sciences, and the media. Each chapter offers original and individual interpretation of individual aspects of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.

Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature PDF Author: Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319692909
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters in nineteenth-century French fiction. It approaches this from a hitherto unexplored perspective: that of the twin history of the aesthetic notion of originality and the legal notion of literary property. While the reappearance of characters in the works of canonical authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola is usually seen as a device which transforms the individual works of an author into a coherent whole, this book argues that the unprecedented systematisation of the reappearance of characters in the nineteenth century has to be seen within a wider cultural, economic, and legal context. While fictional characters are seen as original creations by their authors, from a legal point of view they are considered to be ‘ideas’ which are not protected and can be appropriated by anyone. By co-examining the reappearance of characters in the work of canonical authors and their reappearances in unauthorised appropriations, such as stage adaptations and sequels, this book discusses a series of issues that have shaped our understanding of authorship, originality, and property.

Translating Myth

Translating Myth PDF Author: Ben Pestell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134862490
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction

Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction PDF Author: Scott Maria C. Scott
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474463061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book

Book Description
Explores how and why narrative fiction engages empathy, including Theory of MindOffers a broad overview of current scientific work on the effects of fiction-reading on empathy, including Theory of MindProvides an original intervention in the field of literary theory, centring on the reflexive properties of the fictional strangerIncludes stand-alone close readings of three novels by important French authorsThis book studies recent psychological findings which suggest that reading fiction cultivates empathy, encouraging us to be critically reflective, suspicious readers as well as participatory, 'nave' readers. Scott draws on literary theory and close readings to argue that engagement with fictional stories also teaches us to resist uncritical forms of empathy and reminds us of the limitations of our ability to understand other people. The book treats figures of the stranger in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and Sand's Indiana as emblematic of the strangeness of narrative fiction, both drawing us in and keeping us at a distance.