On Style in Victorian Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many

Some writers of the Victorian period, as well as more recent critics, have argued that the prose style of Victorian fiction aims to efface itself or that an absence of style may in itself represent the nineteenth-century ideal. This collection provides a major assessment of style in Victorian fiction and demonstrates that style - the language, techniques and artistry of prose - is inseparable from meaning and that it is through the many resources of style that the full compass of meaning makes itself known. Leading scholars in the field present an engaging assessment of major Victorian novelists, illustrating how productive and illuminating close attention to literary style can be. Collectively, they build a fresh and nuanced understanding of how style functioned in the literature of the nineteenth century, and propose that the fiction of this era demands we think about what style does, as much as what style is.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

CAPITALISM, CHARITY, AND JUDAISM: THE TRIUMVIRATE OF BENJAMIN FARJEON

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-218
Author(s):  
Michelle Persell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Reference Materials ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Laissez Faire

BENJAMIN LEOPOLD FARJEON (1838–1903) was a novelist of, at best, middling abilities who achieved a modicum of popular success working in the sentimental realist tradition. He was also Jewish, a fact that he neither avoided nor obsessed over. It is just Farjeon’s laissez-faire approach towards ethnic identity that spurs our interest today. He assumed an attitude that was only beginning to be possible in the British Empire in the middle to late Victorian period. Over the years, Farjeon has made perfunctory appearances in such familiar survey and reference materials as Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957), John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), and Linda Gertner Zatlin’s Nineteenth Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (1981), but the only substantial piece of scholarship devoted solely to his work is Lillian Faderman’s dissertation “B. L. Farjeon: Victorian Novelist” (1967). Where Faderman provides a broad-based chronicle of Farjeon’s publications, I focus here on one aspect of his legacy — i.e., how he partook of an incipient opportunity to construct a position for Jews as Englishmen in economic terms.

Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-371
Author(s):  
Irena Yamboliev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Sentence Level

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

Mobility Stopped in Its Tracks

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Poor White ◽  
White Immigrants ◽  
The Many ◽  
Interpretive Framework

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.

Hearing the Crimean War

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Black Sea Region ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Critical Discourses

This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Christian Society

The Introduction looks at the historical context of British and Irish Christianity in the 1840s when the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy began. It also looks at conclusions of historians examining British and Irish emigration in the nineteenth century. Scholars have known for many years that the Victorian period in Britain was one of massive religiosity. Yet, when historians describe emigrants from this highly Christian society arriving in British colonies, the settlers are often described as generally religiously indifferent, unchurched, and even hostile to religion. On this basis it becomes difficult to understand how so many churches were built by British colonists in Australia and other settler colonies; how colonial denominations became established so quickly and effectively; and how sectarianism began, let alone flourished. Finally, this Introduction provides a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the groups of sources that have been used in this study.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Paris Exposition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

The Poetry of Justice: Hesiod and the Origins of Greek Law

Ramus ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gagarin
Keyword(s):  
Law And Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Legal Writing ◽  
Prose Literature ◽  
The Many ◽  
Specific Concern

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.

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