The Old Fashioned Flapper

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-88
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis

Chapter 2 examines the politics of emotion and corporeality in Anita Loos’s 1925 satire of Jazz Age femininity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Blondes is both a satire of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel and a sentimental novel in its own right. The chapter argues that such indeterminacy undergirds Loos’s send-up of the flapper as a figure whose interiority and exteriority are vitally opaque. Loos’s “more old fashioned girl” performs the flapper’s conflicted sexuality and exposes the gendered contradictions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the modernist language experiments exemplified by Gertrude Stein. The chapter connects the novel to contemporary legal debates about minimum wage and prostitution. It therefore argues that Blondes can also be seen as a mock manifesto, a companion piece to other period texts that tread an unclear line between irony and sincerity as they engage politicized discourse about women’s bodies.

scholarly journals Lucy Steele, the Mistress of Sense and Sensibility, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

MANUSYA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Choedphong Uttama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Social Debate

This paper interprets Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) in the context of the literary and social debate about “sense” and “sensibility” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the concept of sense was viewed with a suspicious eye as it might lead sensible persons to machination and manipulation; and, sensibility with a disapproving one as such it had been throughout the tradition of the anti-sentimental novel. This paper thus aims to argue that the portrayal of a female antagonist Lucy Steele who unites assumed sensibility and prudent, selfserving sense to achieve her ambitious aims shows that the novel was responsive to the belief promoted by the antisentimental works that sensibility could be feigned and used to dupe others and at the time rejected the idea that (too much) sense is a desirable quality.

Criminal Minds

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ascari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This chapter provides an archaeology of the ‘psycho-thriller’, which emerged as a named, self-identifying genre in the postwar period and was popularized by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably Psycho (1960). Scholars have pointed out links back to American noir of the 1930s and 1940s, but Ascari goes further by presenting a full prehistory of the genre, arguing that it has roots in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of the conflicted, often irrational mind. Beginning with William Godwin’s psychological philosophy, including its application in the novel Caleb Williams (1794), and ending with novels and films inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, Ascari not only uncovers an alternative history of the genre that crosses boundaries between genres and media, but also articulates a theory of genre predicated on hybridization and mobility rather than outlived notions of origin, stasis and purity.

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.

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.

Thérèse Raquin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

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 Hård sentimentalisme og seksualiseret middelalder i Tom Kristensens En Kavaler i Spanien

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
Rasmus Vangshardt
Keyword(s):  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Medieval Spain ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Erotic

AbstractTom Kristensen’s travel book En Kavaler i Spanien (1926) was the result of a stay at the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen’s house, where Kristensen not only met his physical and psychological superior, he also began his artistic development and personal breakdown towards the novel Hærværk (1930). The article argues that with a departure from this context, En Kavaler i Spanien can be read as an original and complex subgenre of the sentimental novel and it suggests that the work might best be categorized as ‘hard sentimentalism’. This subgenre of the travel novel can be identified in the intertwinement of the core thematic of the book — eroticism, medieval Spain and identity loss — with style and form. The paradoxical generic notion of ‘hard sentimentalism’ is used to connect medieval Spain with the erotic, but in an increasingly dangerous way, which threatens the traveler’s identity by increasing homosexual attraction and opening an abyss of degeneration and distorted emptiness behind the flirt.

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).

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