The Curse of Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 8-24
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Counter Model ◽  
Cognitive Approaches To Literature ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This chapter challenges the assumption that throughout history the novel gets progressively better at realism and at matching its language in cognitive processes. It characterises this assumption as “the curse of realism,” which retroactively imposes standards from the nineteenth-century novel onto texts from earlier periods and evaluates them as lacking stylistic and narrative achievements that they never aimed for. A counter-model, based on embodied cognition and predictive, probabilistic cognition, is proposed. This allows cognitive approaches to literature to move away from a teleological perspective (where the novel improves its match with cognition) and towards a dialectic perspective (where literary texts can relate to cognition in ways that are not inherently more accurate than others). This chapter lays the overall theoretical foundations for the case studies in the following chapters.

scholarly journals Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAMRAN RASTEGAR
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Persian Translation

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, ‘nationalism’ and ‘novelism’, and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as ‘the habitual subordination of writing to the novel’ – it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.

The Anglo-Indian Novel to 1947

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Crane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Prose Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo Indian

This chapter explores the Anglo-Indian novel. The history of British writing on India stretches back almost as far as the Indo-British imperial encounter and includes travel writing, missionary letters, military memoirs, and scholarly accounts of Indian history and culture, all of which were published in great numbers in the eighteenth century. Literary texts followed, and included short prose narratives depicting Anglo-Indian life, missionary tales, descriptions of the landscape, and stories of native life. While all these forms were well received in their day, none was to prove as popular as the novel, which during the nineteenth century became the dominant form of Anglo-Indian literature. In the early nineteenth century, India was also used as an exotic setting for early fictions by a number of writers who would go on to rank amongst the best-known novelists of the Victorian period.

scholarly journals La littérature, entre livre et périodique (19e–21e siècles)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Vaillant
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Common Misconception ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Il est habituellement entendu que la littérature est destinée à la publication en livre, qui seule confèrerait à l’auteur sa vraie légitimité. Or cette vision traditionnelle fausse la réalité historique: non seulement une masse écrasante de textes ‘littéraires’ est publiée exclusivement dans les périodiques, mais, dans le cas spécifique de la France, la presse reste pendant la plus grande part du 19e siècle le mode privilégié de publication. Même si, dans les premières décennies du 20e siècle, les relations vont se rééquilibrer entre le périodique et le non-périodique, cette hégémonie provisoire du périodique dans la communication littéraire joue un rôle déterminant dans l’émergence de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la ‘modernité’: au point qu’on peut soutenir, malgré l’idée reçue, que la littérature est alors devenue, à son corps défendant, un phénomène médiatique. C’est donc une réinterprétation globale de l’histoire littéraire, considérée par le prisme des modes de publication, qui est ici esquissée, aussi bien du point de vue de ses fondements théoriques que, plus concrètement, de sa périodisation pour les 19e–21e siècles. *** It is usually understood that literary publication is intended for books, which alone would confer on the author true legitimacy. However this traditional view distorts historical reality: not only an overwhelming mass of ‘literary’ texts is published exclusively in periodicals, but also, in the specific case of France, the press remains for most of the nineteenth century the privileged mode of publication. Even though, in the first decades of the twentieth century, relations will have found a new balance between periodical and the non-periodical forms, the provisional hegemony of the periodical in literary communication plays a decisive part in the emergence of what is conventionally known as ‘modernity’: to the point that it may be argued, despite the common misconception, that literature has become, against its own will, a media phenomenon. Thus, it is a global reinterpretation of literary history that is sketched here, seen through the prism of publication modes, both from the point of view of its theoretical foundations and, more concretely, of its periodization for the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries.

Dialectics of Improvement

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Lee McKeever
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Field Drainage ◽  
Insight Into

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, it shows, was not a unified ideal in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland but rather a contested body of different ideas, some of which were mutually contradictory. The book untangles the complexity of this term that was applied variously to field drainage, elocution lessons, a taste for landscape scenery and the macrohistory of Western civilisation. As it explores, improvement provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stressing a series of aesthetic innovations across the turn of the nineteenth century in a culture that was saturated by the dialectical workings of improvement.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

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.

Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

Critical Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This concluding chapter argues that the critical contexts of the literary texts dealt with in this volume cannot be so confined inside the period before 1950, not merely for writers whose works have maintained or increased their esteem, but also for the bulk of that work belonging to the large categories of colonial, Victorian, and even nationalist writing that exhibits the values and attitudes of empire. Much of the postcolonial criticism of colonial fiction treats it as symptomatic of imperial views on race, nature, gender, or progress rather than as literature Criticism in this volume means something distinct from that applied to nineteenth-century English literature or American modernist fiction where the specifically literary qualities and values of the writing remain central concerns of its criticism, even where the values and ideology of modernism, for example, have been sharply contested.

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