scholarly journals RELUCTANT COSMOPOLITANISM IN DICKENS'SGREAT EXPECTATIONS

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McBratney
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Victorian Studies

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens'sGreat Expectations(1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).

scholarly journals Junto Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Narrative of Identity and Diaspora

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 202-212
Author(s):  
Samirah Almutairi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Junto Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raises the question of the identity formation for the Caribbean in diaspora. Diasporic Caribbean people struggle with understanding their difference and recognizing the important of assimilating to other people’s lives and cultures when they leave their home country. The struggle of the main character, Oscar Wao, in the novel is established perfectly well through apparent identity crisis that is manifested in his cultural displacements, childhood memories, real-life situations, and unsuccessful relationship with the other sex. It is a problem that Oscar creates his passage towards constructing a national identity, which ends in a tragic death. Caribbean people should privilege a hybrid identify if they want to live outside the West Indies. The present article aims to analyze from a postcolonial perspective Oscar’s futile search for national identity in diaspora and its consequences. This is clarified through a discussion of migration, the results of living in diaspora on the identity formation for the main character, relationships with women, and the concept of a return to the homeland.

scholarly journals Junto Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Narrative of Identity and Diaspora

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samirah Almutairi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Junto Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raises the question of the identity formation for the Caribbean in diaspora. Diasporic Caribbean people struggle with understanding their difference and recognizing the important of assimilating to other people’s lives and cultures when they leave their home country. The struggle of the main character, Oscar Wao, in the novel is established perfectly well through apparent identity crisis that is manifested in his cultural displacements, childhood memories, real-life situations, and unsuccessful relationship with the other sex. It is a problem that Oscar creates his passage towards constructing a national identity, which ends in a tragic death. Caribbean people should privilege a hybrid identify if they want to live outside the West Indies. The present article aims to analyze from a postcolonial perspective Oscar’s futile search for national identity in diaspora and its consequences. This is clarified through a discussion of migration, the results of living in diaspora on the identity formation for the main character, relationships with women, and the concept of a return to the homeland.

The problem of language identity in Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novel I want! in contemporary sociocultural context

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Baydalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Life Goal ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
National Question ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Ukrainian Society

The novel by Volodymyr Vynnychenko I want! (1915) was, on one hand, his literary answer to the discussion on the national question in Ukrainian society, and, on the other, it was his reaction to the accusations of him being a renegade resulting from his shift towards Russian literature. In 1907-1908, after the publication of his dramas and novels which were impregnated with the idea of “being honest with oneself” (it implied that all thoughts, feelings, and acts were to be in harmony), his works could be more easily published in Russian than in Ukrainian. This situation was taken by his compatriots as a betrayal against his native language and the national cause. In the novel I want! the problem of language identity is directly linked with national identity. In the beginning of the novel the main character, poet Andrey Halepa, despite being ethnic Ukrainian, spoke, thought, and wrote poems in Russian, and consequently his personality was ruined and his actions lacked motivation. It seems that after his unsuccessful suicide attempt and under the influence of a “conscious” Ukrainian, Halepa got in touch with his national identity and developed a life goal (the “revival” of the Ukrainian nation and the building of a free-labour enterprise). However, in the novel, national identity turns out to be incomplete without language identity. Halepa spoke Ukrainian with mistakes, had difficulty choosing suitable words, and discovered with surprise the meaning of some Ukrainian words from his former Russian friends. The open finale emphasises the irony of the discourse around a fast national “revival” without struggle and effort, and which only required someone’s will.

Changing the date: Local councils, Australia Day and cultures of national commemoration

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110445
Author(s):  
Rachel Busbridge
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Local Council

In recent years, a small but growing number of Australian local councils have emerged as major actors in the movement to change the date of Australia Day by electing to replace or cancel local events held on 26 January. This article draws on Lyn Spillman’s analysis of the 1988 Australia Bicentenary to make sense of these developments and their implications for cultures of national commemoration in Australia. For Spillman, the Bicentenary marked a shift towards a thinner conception of national identity which was intended to increase buy-in for Australia Day but risked fostering fragmentation. Arguing that local council actions to ‘Change the Date’ can be understood within these fragmentary dynamics, the article shows how the federal politicisation of Australia Day has seen these councils present local vernacular commemorations as preferable to official ones and promote an alternative moral vision of the place of Indigenous peoples in the nation.

Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency

Good Form ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 124-152
Author(s):  
Jesse Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Moral Intuition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Miss Marjoribanks ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Sensus Communis ◽  
Physical Sensation

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

scholarly journals Who We Are Is What Makes Us Laugh: Humour as Discourse on Identity and Hegemony

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Ylagan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Status ◽  
Popular Representations

There exists a sociocultural function to humour that is geared towards maintaining order through a subversion (or inversion) of the more serious, structured status quo, and while there is a pragmatic side to the dispensation of humour across any given society, humour can also serve a fundamentally ontological function in determining and representing a group’s identity. Though notions of social organization and culture exist and are perpetuated primarily within a group’s literary canon, as espoused for example in the privileging of genres such as the epic or the novel as loci of national identity, this paper argues that such identities can be just as effectively – if not better – constructed through popular representations in humour, especially in satirical content found in “ephemeral” mediums such as comic strips. Such representations in turn can be mobilized to complement or even dismantle the status quo and offer alternative paradigms of understanding national identities and cultural affiliations.

Particular Webs:Middlemarch,Typologies, and Digital Studies of Women's Lives

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Booth
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Digital Studies ◽  
Digital Research

[H]e was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation … to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes.—George Eliot,MiddlemarchIt would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to George Eliot'sMiddlemarchthat is not already anticipated in some way by the novel's sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintessential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot's prototyping of information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist ethics. Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate's penetrative “invention,” in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual “flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as dedicated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot's readers, seeing Lydgate's errors, are flattered into believing we miss no signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and interpretative advocacy.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

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