Worlds Enough

Worlds Enough
Author: Elaine Freedgood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691227810

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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.

Telegraphic Realism

Telegraphic Realism
Author: Richard Menke
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804756914

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Telegraphic Realism demonstrates the connections between British nineteenth-century fiction, media technologies, and developing ideas about information, from the postage stamp to wireless.

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real
Author: Audrey Jaffe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190269936

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'The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real' argues that Victorian novelistic realism is a product of the Victorians' overarching desire, both cultural and ideological, for the real. What the book calls 'realist fantasy' describes the way in which the conventions used to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies also shape the more general and generalized fantasy that constitutes each particular novel's imagining of the real.

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense
Author: Caroline Levine
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780813922171

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Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".

Seeming Human

Seeming Human
Author: Megan Ward
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780814213759

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Finds a new theory of Victorian realist character in the mid-twentieth-century emergence of artificial intelligence.

Realismustheorien in England (1692-1919)

Realismustheorien in England (1692-1919)
Author: Walter F. Greiner
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1997
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 9783823351726

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Victorian Criticism of the Novel

Victorian Criticism of the Novel
Author: Edwin M. Eigner
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1985-11-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521275200

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By the end of the nineteenth century the novel unquestionably had become the most popular and influential of English literary forms. Yet it has not always been clear how the Victorians themselves regarded the nature of prose fiction. This volume is a collection of twelve 'landmark' essays that chart the development of English theories of fiction during the great age of the novel. Spanning the whole of the Victorian period, from Bulwer Lytton's 'On Art in Fiction' (1838) to Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), the volume also includes pieces by George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a number of the more important critics and reviewers of the time. The editors' introduction surveys the main issues, such as the debate between realism and romance, addressed by novel criticism throughout the period. Each of the selections that follow is set in its historical context by a prefatory essay and is fully annotated for the student. There is a helpful bibliography of further reading.

The Science of Character

The Science of Character
Author: S. Pearl Brilmyer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226815781

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"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--

The Victorian realistic novel. The vexations of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens at an era of progress and dominance

The Victorian realistic novel. The vexations of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens at an era of progress and dominance
Author: Georgia Foskolou
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 15
Release: 2019-09-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3346019772

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Essay from the year 2019 in the subject English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 76, University of Greenwich (New York College), course: COML1061 The 19th century British Novel, language: English, abstract: This essay discusses how Capitalism, Colonialism and Gender inequality are depicted in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. The era from the enthrownment of Queen Victoria in 1837 to her death and the end of her reign in 1901, namely the Victorian era, was a time where great changes in society, economy and politics occurred in Britain, which shaped both Britain and the world as we know it today and of course impacted the literature of the time. (Wukovits, 2013) At a large scale, the literary work developed and published in the Victorian era moved away from the romantic and chivalry genre to the realistic genre, which is a mode of writing, which appears as if it is faithfully representing reality, presenting characters who are ordinary people set in unremarkable circumstances and ordinary environments and are struggling with social complexities in their environment. The Victorian realistic novel functions as a fictional microcosm where through the social struggle of these imaginary characters, the sociopolitical changes of the real Victorian society and their adverse effects are reported, imbued with the hope of the author that eventually the social issues they brought about will be resolved if they are brought to the light. (Moran, 2006) This paper will present how the financial and industrial progress along with the political dominance of the British Empire inside of Britain and to the British colonies affected Charlotte Brontë in the writing of Jane Eyre and how the social adversities of industrialization affected Charles Dickens in the writing of Great Expectations.