REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ABNORMAL BODY INTHE MOONSTONE

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Mossman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Wilkie Collins'sThe Moonstoneis anovel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. ReadingThe Moonstonein critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying thatThe Moonstoneis “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others, around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.

The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Country House ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Moonstone

‘Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?’ A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves. One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE BRAHMIN PRIESTS IN WILKIE COLLINS'STHE MOONSTONE

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-800
Author(s):  
Niketa G. Narayan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Family ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
The Impact

When T. S. Eliotfamously called Wilkie Collins's 1868 novelThe Moonstone“the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” (The Moonstone1966, v), the implication, presumably, was that the “detectives” are the hero Franklin Blake and other English characters who carry out the detective function, such as the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff. In addition to a detective story, the novel has been read variously as imperialist, anti-imperialist, a narrative invested with economic undertones, and as an exploration of gift theory, among others. In all these iterations, however, the underlying assumption has been that the only real “detectives” in the novel are the English characters; it is they who solve the theft of the diamond and work to police it. The Brahmin priests, whose pursuit of the diamond parallels that of the English, have generally been viewed as peripheral to the main narrative; a marginal acknowledgement of the impact that India, in its various facets, had upon nineteenth-century English society. Vicki Corkran Willey calls the priests, tongue-in-cheek, “‘villains’. . . working in tandem with two other imported troublemakers – [John] Herncastle's stolen diamond and the drug, opium” (226). Timothy L. Carens describes them as practicing “dutiful self-renunciation” (246) in their search for the diamond, implying that passivity is inherent in such dutifulness, and Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests they are important only because of their use of “[c]lairvoyance [which] is projected on to them as a form of romantic fascination, [and] which they then internalize and represent” (193). Critics are in general agreement, then, that the priests are not central to the novel, and their involvement in the solving of the crime is minimal. The present essay will refute this perspective and argue that, in fact, the Brahmin priests are central to the narrative and far more active (and effective) policing agents than the English characters.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

‘Is This an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?’

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-239
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Criminal Behaviour ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This chapter suggests that tenancy plays a major role in nineteenth-century detective fiction, an emerging genre that counted Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Warren Adams as enthusiastic early practitioners. The chapter starts by investigating the relationship between geography, class, and morality in contemporary social discourses, focusing on the ‘low’ or ‘common’ lodging house in London. Low lodging houses were widely associated with criminal behaviour, and Dickens and Collins were interested in the function they could perform in their fiction. The chapter moves on to examine the murders that take place in Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Notting Hill Mystery, and argues that rented space becomes a tool in the battle between detective and criminal. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Krook’s lodging house and rag-and-bone shop in Bleak House. Here, a mystery narrative intersects with farce and the Gothic, attesting to the porosity between aesthetic forms.

Pain of Privacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Prescriptive Authority ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Western Imagination

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

scholarly journals Lexical Choices and Ideology in Translation: A Case Study of 'The old Man and the Sea

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 258-265
Author(s):  
Maryam Najafian
Keyword(s):  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Original Sample ◽  
Significant Difference

The present research aims at conducting a critical study of the novel 'The Old Man and the Sea' written by Ernest Hemingway (1976) and its two translated versions in Persian; one rendered by Faramarzi (2006) the other by Shahin (1979). The researchers apply a comparative lexical analysis proposed by Newmark (1988) and Venuti (1995). An attempt has been made to reveal the ideology behind the original sample words and to show how translators and the effect thereof handle it. The data of this research consists of 10 ideological laden terms selected randomly among 45 words from the original text and the corresponding Persian translations. The results of this study suggest a significant difference between the two Persian translations and the original novel. It revealed that one of the translators has attempted to 'domesticate' his translation while another has been attentive to 'foreignize' it. As for implication, it seems necessary to note that translational decisions made by actual translators under different socio-cultural and ideological settings in real life and real situations should be considered. The perlocutionary consequences resulted from adoption of such decisions are of importance.

The Leonid Grossman’s Ingenious Introduction to Dostoevsky’s Translation of Eugenie Grandet (“Academia”, 1935)

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Serge Rolet ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Material Interests ◽  
Precise Interpretation

What was the reason for publishing an old translation of “Eugénie Grandet” that has not been published since 1918, while there exist two newer translations? In this edition of “Eugénie Grandet” L. Grossman is liberated from the editorial direction, advertised by “Academia”. This translated version is not canonical, the translation is not up to modern standards, the text is detached from the scientific apparatus, etc. Grossman intends to prove that publishing an old translation of the novel has its merit, despite the fact that it inherits the traits of a bygone era and is widely considered outdated. In this context the preface by Grib (that precedes Grossman’s article) served to prove that a contemporary, “proletariat” edition of “Eugénie Grandet” could be completed using the translation from the previous era. Using Grib’s introductory article, Grossman shifts the attention to the translator, who usually stays out of sight. Now it is almost like the original text is serving the translation, not the other way around. As a matter of fact, Grossman, a well-known scholar of Dostoevsky, was only interested in Balzac due to his influence on the genesis of the Russian classic’s art. According to Grossman, the translation is unparalleled, but that is due to the creativity and sheer force of its style rather than its precision in following Balzac’s original. The fusion of the author and the translator’s styles gives more value to the translation than the limited attempt at precise interpretation. The attention that this translation received derives not from its connection to the original, but rather from the urge to understand the extent to which Balzac’s novel influenced Dostoevsky. It is safe to assume that the influence of “Eugénie Grandet” on Dostoevsky was of interest to a very narrow circle of scholars. Therefore, it seems possible that the reasons for this were of the same nature as the reasons that Dostoevsky had for translating the novel in the first place: the material interests of the editor might have been the deciding factor.

scholarly journals The Hagia Sophia and the Other Turkish Locations in Agatha Christie’s “Murder On the Orient Express”

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Ajda Bastan
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Train Station ◽  
Hagia Sophia ◽  
Agatha Christie

British author Agatha Christie, who is one of the best-selling novelists in world literature, is the pioneering figure of detective fiction. Christie, the queen of mystery, wrote about eighty novels during her life. A great number of the author’s books were also adapted into movies. Viewed as one of Agatha Christie's most noteworthy accomplishments, the novel Murder on the Orient Express was released in 1934. It is highly believed that Agatha Christie wrote this novel during her long stays in Istanbul. The story is about a Belgian detective investigating a crime that occurred on the train. In Murder on the Orient Express many places and locations related to Turkey are mentioned. These are the Sainte Sophie (Hagia Sophia), the Orient Express, the Taurus Express, Nissibin, the Cilician Gates, Istanbul, Konya, The Bosporus, the Galata Bridge, The Tokatlian Hotel, Smyrna, Taurus and Hayda-passar. The novel starts with the completion of Hercule Poirot's investigation in Syria at the Aleppo train station. Poirot goes to Istanbul via the Taurus Express, where he wants to take the Orient Express to London. In fact, Poirot wants to make a few days’ holiday in Istanbul and visit Hagia Sophia.

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