The Telegraphic Principle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-52
Author(s):  
David Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
System P ◽  
Blue Eyes ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This chapter concerns the attitudes, practices, and figures of speech that during the course of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the eventual separation of the idea of the signal from that of the sign. It has to do with the emergence of the telegraphic principle (initially by means of the Napoleonic-era optical telegraph) as a thrillingly effective implementation of remote intimacy. Its main focus is on the intimacies developed remotely, by signal rather than sign, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and in novels by Thomas Hardy: in particular, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved. In Hardy’s fiction, sexual desire expresses itself in, or as, an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The Wessex the novels map is at times less a terrain than the basis for a telecommunications system.

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

scholarly journals ‘The return of the native by Thomas Hardy: Eustacia Vye or the bovarysme embodied in Wessex”

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (53) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Goater
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Jude The Obscure ◽  
Shed Light

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the great English novelists of the late Victorian era. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are among his most famous novels. If he was not directly influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetics, Hardy was very much inspired by the heroine of Madame Bovary. Indeed, quite a few of Hardy’s female characters, whether in his novels or in his short stories, suffer with varying degrees from “bovarysme’, the disease of imagination and affectivity which is one of Emma Bovary’s central features. This paper aims to shed light on the posterity of Flaubert’s character through Eustacia Vye, the heroine of The Return of the Native, to show to what extent she represents not a pale imitation but an original variation on an essential model of Western literature. 

scholarly journals On the Theme of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Guorong Lu ◽  
Zhehui Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
The Third ◽  
Three Phase ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Jude The Obscure ◽  
Harsh Reality ◽  
Shed Light

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure got the most attention of the critical world in the nineteenth century of Britain. The theme was always regarded as the embodiment of original sin, pessimism and voluntarism. However, when the theme is analyzed again, it will be found something totally different. Hence, three-phase patterns are to be singled out for a case study in order to shed light upon some facts and conclusions. The first stage is the expression of optimism from the perspective of symbolism; the second stage is the representation of conflict between character and environment in light of Darwinism; the third stage is the exploration of rationality from the viewpoints of religion and feminism. What can be learned is that the story is meant to show readers the kindness tendency, the courage to face the harsh reality and a sense of rationality.

DRESSING UP: HARDY’S TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES AND OLIPHANT’S PHOEBE JUNIOR

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsie B. Michie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Clothing Industry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Middle Region ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Late Nineteenth

THE ANXIETY ABOUT BEING ill- or well-dressed that Margaret Oliphant evokes so vividly in this passage was particularly acute in the last half of the nineteenth century when changes in the clothes people wore reflected increasing class mobility. With the growth of a ready-to-wear clothing industry that made it more and more difficult to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the lower echelons of society, “dress became,” as Charles Blanc argued in 1872, “an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). Alongside and as a result of this democratization of dress, a backlash occurred in which subtleties of dress became a means of reinforcing the very class distinctions that seemed to be vanishing in the late nineteenth century. As Rudolph von Jhering argued in 1869, “Fashion is the barrier — continually raised anew because continually torn down — by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Phoebe Junior, Thomas Hardy and Oliphant use fashion to explore the freedoms and limitations of late nineteenth- century class mobility by telling the story of heroines who are able, in part through education, to separate themselves from their lower-class roots, a separation that is marked in each case by a change in attire.

Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dunagan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Development ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
And Gender

Katherine Dunagan Osborne, "Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms" (pp. 465––493) This essay removes George Eliot's heroines from heterosexual dyads to focus on the roles that things play in women's autonomous moral and sexual development. Because Eliot's female protagonists can adapt heirlooms for their own private and emotional purposes, they can replace traditional inheritance based on bloodlines with a non-familial, emotional inheritance, thus illustrating the subtlety of Eliot's family and gender politics. This reading of Eliot contextualizes specific heirlooms in Middlemarch (1871––72) and Daniel Deronda (1876)——including miniature portraits, emeralds, turquoises, and diamonds——to reveal the surprising politics embedded in Eliot's heirlooms that her nineteenth-century readers would certainly have recognized.

The Lighting Design of Hardy's Novels

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Lighting Design ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
The City ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This essay argues that the phenomenology of light in Thomas Hardy's novels affords a key to his representation of subjectivity. The lighting of most scenes in nineteenth-century fiction is never specified. But from the spectacular lighting effects of Hardy's early sensation novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), to the futile quest for the "City of Light" in Jude the Obscure (1895) and the burned-out pyrotechnics of his last narrative, The Well-Beloved (1897), the light of Hardy's fiction is marked in a double sense——both described in detail and registered as exceptional. Rather than a figure for enlightenment, as in the realist novels of George Eliot and others, Hardy's light is the medium of subjectivity, and it characteristically occludes and distorts as much as it illuminates. Like the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art the novelist excitedly recognized as an analogue of his own, Hardy represents light not as an absence to be looked through but as something to be looked at and closely observed in all its varieties.

The 1997 Centennial Commemoration and the Memory of Lattimer

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-90
Author(s):  
Paul A. Shackel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Welfare System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Community Stakeholders ◽  
System P ◽  
Local Politicians ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The centennial event at Lattimer was attended by the president of the UMWA, labor organizers, local politicians, and community stakeholders, and they commemorated significant places associated with the massacre. Three local cemeteries established markers noting the final resting places of the several of the victims. The memory of Lattimer became important to some during the 1990s when the Hazleton area began to attract immigrants who came for the unskilled jobs and inexpensive housing. Citizens have criticized the newcomers and espoused neoliberal ideals. While immigrants in the late nineteenth century are celebrated because they worked hard to support their families, like the miners at Lattimer, the newcomers, some residents assert, arrived to exploit the welfare system.

The Mendicity Society Movement and the Suppression of Begging

2018 ◽  
pp. 146-184
Author(s):  
Ciarán McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Parent Body ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Poor ◽  
System P ◽  
Short Space

Between 1809 and the early-1840s more than fifty mendicity societies were established throughout Ireland. These charities focused on the suppression of street begging and the relief of the destitute poor. Mendicity societies took their lead from earlier societies located in Britain and mainland Europe, and in Ireland the Dublin association acted as a parent body for this movement. While playing a prominent role in the welfare landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century Ireland’s mendicity societies largely disappeared within a short space of time, largely on foot of the introduction of the Poor Law system.

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