The Politics Of Story In Victorian Social Fiction

Download or read book The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction written by Rosemarie Bodenheimer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most telling expression of the politics of a novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer asserts, lies not in its proclaimed social intent, its continuity with nonfictional discourse, or its truth to class experience, but in the models of social movement and transformation traced out in the thread of its narrative. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction explores the story patterns and other narrative conventions through which the industrial or social-problem novel gives fictional shape to questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, and troubling in the Victorian age. Bodenheimer considers novels explicitly linked with the condition of England debates that preoccupied public-minded Victorians, narratives that confront such topics as the factory system, industrial and rural poverty, working-class politics, and the plight of women. Grouping well-known novels with less frequently read works according to shared narrative patterns, Bodenheimer delineates lines of influence, argument, and development within the subgenre of social fiction. Among the works she discusses are Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, two novels by Frances Trollope, Geraldine Jewsbury's Marian Withers, George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil.

Download or read book The Victorian Novel written by Francis O'Gorman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Download or read book A Companion to the Victorian Novel written by William Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-01-30 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian novels remain enormously popular today: some continue to be made into films, while authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are firmly established in the canon and taught at all levels. These works have also attracted a great deal of critical attention, with much current scholarship examining the novel in relation to its historical, political, and cultural contexts. This reference book is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a fresh account of past, current, and new directions in scholarship. The volume is divided into several broad sections, with chapters in each section treating more specialized topics. The first section looks at the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on the growth of serialization and the development of the novel of syndication. The second explores significant social and cultural facets of nineteenth-century British literature, while the third discusses the principal features of different genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, detective fiction, the social problem novel, and contemporary film adaptations. Individual authors are examined in the fourth section, while the fifth overviews various critical approaches and their application to nineteenth-century fiction.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature written by Dennis Denisoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Download or read book The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England written by Barbara Leah Harman and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men - the world of mills and city streets, of political activism and labor strikes, of public speaking and parliamentary debates - she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England. Harman examines at length Bronte's Shirley, Gaskell's North and South, Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, and Elizabeth Robins's The Convert, reading these novels in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement. She argues that these texts constitute a countertradition in Victorian fiction: neither domestic fiction nor fiction about the public "fallen" woman, these novels reveal how nineteenth-century English writers began to think about female transgression into the political sphere and about the intriguing meanings of women's public appearances.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Novel written by Paul Schellinger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

Download or read book The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy written by Andrew Mangham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy is a reassessment of the languages and methodologies used, throughout the nineteenth century, for discussing extreme hunger in Britain. Set against the providentialism of conservative political economy, this study uncovers an emerging, dynamic way of describing literal starvation in medicine and physiology. No longer seen as a divine punishment for individual failings, starvation became, in the human sciences, a pathology whose horrific symptoms registered failings of state and statute. Providing new and historically-rich readings of the works of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, this book suggests that the realism we have come to associate with Victorian social problem fiction learned a vast amount from the empirical, materialist objectives of the medical sciences and that, within the mechanics of these intersections, we find important re-examinations of how we might think about this ongoing humanitarian issue.