Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. Judith Lowder NewtonThe Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria. Carla L. PetersonWomen in the English Novel, 1800-1900. Merryn WilliamsSex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Signs ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-369
Author(s):  
Patricia Meyer Spacks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Politics And Science ◽  
British Fiction

The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 308-320
Author(s):  
John Wolffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The Devil

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Folkenflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Illustrated Novels ◽  
First Editions

This chapter describes the rise of the illustrated English novel. Eighteenth-century novels were cheap; illustrations expensive. Illustrated novels typically were not first editions, though some of the best known (Robinson Crusoe, Sir Launcelot Greaves) anomalously were. Looking at novels from roughly twenty years apart, one can see a number of changes from the increased presence of native engravers and designers to the burgeoning of illustrated volumes with the overthrow of perpetual copyright in 1774 (making possible the novel series of James Harrison and others), as well as shifting technologies leading from copperplates to the use of steel engravings in the nineteenth century. Important illustrators of novels included Pine and Clark, Hayman and Gravelot, Hogarth, Thomas Stothard, Thomas Rowlandson, Blake, and George Cruikshank.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

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