How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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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.

How to Read the Victorian Novel

How to Read the Victorian Novel PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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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 Feeling of Reading

The Feeling of Reading PDF Author: Rachel Ablow
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472051075
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The first collection of criticism devoted to the problem of reading in Victorian literature

Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science

Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science PDF Author: David Sweeney Coombs
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

Problem Novels

Problem Novels PDF Author: Anna Maria Jones
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
"In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating "invisibly" in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader's engagement with the text." "In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines "problem novels" - that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally embedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists' attachments to critical "detective work" closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers."--BOOK JACKET.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination PDF Author: Allen MacDuffie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139993291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.

The Victorian Novel

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

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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.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters PDF Author: Philip Davis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781444304626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionatedefense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact andimportance for readers interested in the relationship betweenliterature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature forcontemporary readers and academics, through the author’sunique insight into why it is still important today Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian worksof literature and close readings of important texts Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, fromgeneral readers and scholars alike Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set ofvalues, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital andresonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Notework

Notework PDF Author: Simon Reader
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Notework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures.

Reading for Health

Reading for Health PDF Author: Erika Wright
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.