Translation and Its Affects

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Language ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Do So

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Jane Eyre: Now and Forever; or, the Strange Afterlife of Gothic

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Allen ◽  
Dino Franco Felluga
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Opera Seria

Abstract This paper examines the recent fascination the Broadway musical has had with Victorian gothic, focusing both on the transition from opera seria to Disneyesque musical and on one specific cultural product, Paul Gordon and John Caird’s 2000 Broadway production, Jane Eyre: The Musical.  The paper claims that this particular hybrid of two notoriously hybrid nineteenth-century forms (the novel and opera) defangs both of its source genres, but nevertheless still allows its middle-class audience to participate in the spectacle of their own self-definition as consumers of “culture.”  The production also allows that audience to congratulate itself for having escaped the bourgeois repressions that arguably made the gothic such a viable genre in the Romantic and Victorian periods.  The fact is, though, that contemporary viewers of the Broadway gothic musical do still experience the frisson of a repressed terror: the return to a postmodern world that scripts our camp appreciation of such kitsch entertainments.

Fiction and the Native Author

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Short Story ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Do So

This chapter discusses native authors of fiction. Indigenous, colonized, or native authors of fiction in English are rare in the British Empire before 1950. There are exceptions, however, in India, there is a body of English-language fiction from the second half of the nineteenth-century onwards. Nevertheless, a sustained presence and the development of a local literary tradition in English were difficult. The short story, published in newspapers and magazines, was a more common though at the same time more ephemeral form than the novel. Native writers authored prose collections of Indigenous myths and legends in English, overtly signalling their authority to do so in terms of their Indigenous identity and the access it entailed.

scholarly journals The Gentleman as a Hero? (Mis)representations of Heroic Masculinity in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 372
Author(s):  
Katri Sirkel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Implicit Assumption ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Controversial Nature

The aim of the article is to analyse the concept of gentlemanliness with regard to heroic masculinity in W.M. Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. Set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and written in the 1840s, the novel casts light on the controversial nature of the notion of gentleman. In the Victorian period, gentlemanliness came to be modelled on the principles of chivalry but there was nevertheless an implicit assumption originating from the Regency era that being a gentleman meant yielding to leisurely elegance rather than performing heroic deeds. Thackeray, whose formative years had passed in the Regency-tinted 1820s and early 1830s but who as a novelist gained maturity in the mid-nineteenth century, was acutely aware of the contradiction between the Regency and Victorian perceptions of gentlemanliness and the unease resulting therefrom. Thus, the paper argues that although the Regency standards of gentlemanliness were discarded as incompatible with Victorian heroic masculinity, they had a considerable influence on how heroism as a component of gentlemanliness was perceived in the Victorian era. The analysis of gentlemanliness focuses on the four principal male characters in the novel – Jos Sedley, Rawdon Crawley, George Osborne, and William Dobbin, of whom each represents aspects of gentlemanliness not entirely compatible with the Victorian heroic ideal. The article suggests that the characters take heroism as an asset for creating a heroic image rather than as a manifestation of heroic deeds, thus presenting vividly the contradiction within the concept of Victorian heroic masculinity.

The Aristocrat in the Mirror: Male Vanity and Bourgeois Desire in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH ROSE COLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Garden City ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Mirror Gazing ◽  
Historical Model ◽  
The French Revolution

39 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old R´´gime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Doubleday, 1955), pp. 88-89.Taking their cue from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34), scholars of Regency and early-Victorian dandyism have focused on a supposed opposition between the dandyism of a declining aristocracy and the moral earnestness of a rising bourgeoisie. This historical model obscures the full complexity of relations between the nineteenthcentury British bourgeoisie and aristocracy, a complexity that can be illuminated by a closer examination of William Makepeace Thackeray's works. Thackeray's novels and sketches, which are surprisingly filled with middle-class dandies (such as Vanity Fair's George Osborne and Jos Sedley) and vigorous, hypermasculine aristocrats (such as Vanity Fair's Rawdon Crawley), reverse the Victorian literary stereotypes of effete aristocrats and manly bourgeoisie. Focusing particularly on Vanity Fair (1847- 48) and on Thackeray's sketch journalism, I seek to understand why Thackeray repeatedly depicts bourgeois men who are feminized both by their vanity and by their homosocial-even homoerotic-desire for more powerful aristocratic men. My essay places Thackeray's works within recent historiographical models that emphasize the fusion of, rather than the opposition between, the nineteenth-century British bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Protesting against this fusion in the name of bourgeois independence, Thackeray indicts the British middle classes for their obsession with aristocratic concepts of gentility,a phenomenon that he was the first to label "snobbism." For Thackeray, I argue, the comic trope of bourgeois male vanity becomes an especially powerful device for critiquing"snobbism." By calling upon the scandalous figure of the mirror-gazing man,Thackeray attempts to shock his middle-class readers into acknowledging the artificial and performative nature of their own class personae.

Trimalchio in West Egg: The Great Gatsby Onstage

Prospects ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 489-506
Author(s):  
Robert E. Morsberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Great Gatsby

In the Nineteenth Century, it was common practice for popular novels to be adapted to the theater. In the absence of any distinguished playwrights in English between Sheridan and Shaw, the novel was the most flourishing middle-class literary entertainment, and the theater-going public found compensation for the dearth of original drama by seeing their favorite fictional characters on stage. Novels by Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain were dramatized with varying degrees of success, together with plays from such popular favorites as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Under Two Flags, Ben-Hur, The Prisoner of Zenda, If I Were King, and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

A Tramp at Home

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
AXEL NISSEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Homeless Men ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Romantic Friendship ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) contains the materials for a wide-ranging analysis of the different and competing understandings of American manhood in the nineteenth century and the ways in which men might interact with each other and love each other. In order to understand better the sexual and emotional dynamics of the novel, we must understand the other kinds of writings about men alone and together that Twain was responding to. In this essay I place Twain's classic novel in two nineteenth-century discursive contexts that have been obscured in the existing criticism: the fiction of romantic friendship and the public debate on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn may be seen as the reverse of the medal of normative, middle-class masculinity in Victorian America and as a counterpoint to the more conventional, idealized accounts of romantic friendship in the works of several of Twain's contemporaries and rivals. I suggest that while Huck and Jim negotiate an uncommon type of romantic friendship across barriers of race and generation, the duke and the dauphin appear as a grotesque parody of high-minded "brotherly love." By co-opting some of the conventions of romantic friendship fiction, Twain decreased the distance between his underclass characters and middle-class readers. Yet by writing and publishing the first novel about tramps during a period of heightened national concern about homeless men, Twain increased the topicality and popular appeal of what was, in its initial American publication in 1885, a subscription book that needed an element of sensationalism in order to sell.

SOUND AND SCENTS

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 385-387
Author(s):  
Barbara T. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Visual Imagination ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Do So

AFTER MORE THAN A DECADEscrutinizing the importance of sight in the nineteenth century, Victorian scholars are training their own sights on other senses. Books like Jonathan Crary'sTechniques of the Observer(MIT 1990), James Krasner'sEntangled Eye(Oxford 1992), and Kate Flint'sThe Victorians and the Visual Imagination(Cambridge 2000)–studies that revolutionized our understanding of why and how sight mattered in Victorian culture–have recently been complemented by books like the two under review here. Janice Carlisle'sCommon Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fictionand John M. Picker'sVictorian Soundscapeshave much in common. While focusing on a sense other than sight, each shifts gracefully between Victorian culture and literature, and each demonstrates concern with class and gender. Both books can certainly awaken a reader to a new recognition of what it meant to be alive during an era of rapid change and rampant class-consciousness. We sniff out others along with the characters in Carlisle's chosen novels and retreat to our own quiet studies with sighs of relief as we read about Picker's Victorian scholars' and illustrators' attempts to create soundproof studies in order to exclude the cries and clatter of London streets. As we do so, it is all but impossible to come away without a refreshed perception of what it meant to be a middle-class Victorian male, besieged by the smell of an alluring woman or the annoying sound of a persistent organ grinder.

Vagrancy and the Fantasy of Unproductive Writing in David Copperfield

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-217
Author(s):  
Andrew Willson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mediating Effects ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Economic Sphere ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
Do So

Andrew Willson, “Vagrancy and the Fantasy of Unproductive Writing in David Copperfield” (pp. 192–217) Recent criticism of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50) has often drawn attention to the eponymous character’s rise to respectable and productive professional authorship. This essay, however, considers the fact that one of David’s most formative experiences, the flight from London to Dover that removes him from the blacking warehouse and sets him on the path to a middle-class life, casts him as an instance of the most disrespectable, unproductive member of Victorian society: the vagrant who chooses not to work. As invested, then, as David Copperfield is in promoting traditional Victorian values such as earnestness and industriousness, it is equally committed to recuperating the value of unproductive acts in an industrial society. Yet, as the novel itself is evidence of Dickens’s abundant productivity, it clearly cannot do so without complications. From the complexities inherent in Dickens’s competing fascinations with participating in and escaping from the economic sphere, this essay argues, a picture emerges of the imaginative tools that Dickens uses to conceptualize literary value and provide solutions for his vexed relationship to the market. In David Copperfield, Dickens uses David’s vagrancy and mediating effects as narrator to suggest that even though his own novel is produced for the market, it is not defined by the market’s logic.

scholarly journals Anthropocentrism and Taxidermy in Santiago Nazarian's Neve negra

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Varela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

In the present essay, I argue that taxidermy is a fundamental element in Brazilian novelist Santiago Nazarian’s Neve negra (2017). To do so, I frame my argument by using studies on anthropocentrism and the relationship between the human and the non-human through taxidermy. The first part of the essay examines recent studies on taxidermy and primary sources from the nineteenth century that center on the art and science of skinning, preparing, and mounting dead specimens. The second part focuses on a close reading of Nazarian’s novel by studying the narrator’s patriarchal and masculine anxieties in conjunction with taxidermy and the non-human characters that appear in the novel.

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