Making Of The Victorian Novelist

Download or read book The Victorian Art of Fiction written by Rohan Maitzen and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2009-06-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses where Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”

Download or read book Making of the Victorian Novelist written by Bradley Deane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture and offers an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign could be esteemed among the greatest of artists. Between these extremes stretches a century of ideological contention between alternative representations of authorship. Deane brings new attention in his account to the trends in publishing and the expanding market surrounding Victorian literature, such as the new modes of production, arguments over copyright legislation, and revisions of the criteria of periodical criticism. Combining literary sociology and close readings, The Making of the Victorian Novelist offers an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced - and ultimately shattered - the Victorians' understanding of their great novelists.

Download or read book Victorian Publishing written by Alexis Weedon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

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 Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel written by Kathleen Renk and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader’s imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian “woman question”? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women’s creative potential?

Download or read book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel written by J. Zigarovich and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks why Brontë, Dickens, and Collins saw the narrative act as a series of textual murders and resurrections? Drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Blanchot, and de Man, Zigarovich maintains that narrating death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an industrial and destabilized culture.