Collapse of the Scenic Method

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-151
Author(s):  
Brian Gingrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Kate Chopin

Beyond the imperative or appearance of realism, some scenic impulse in nineteenth-century fiction determines narrative pace. One looks, then, to Charlotte Brontë, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even to the realist Balzac in his theatrical tendencies. This chapter reckons with how the scenic impulse that engenders scene-and-summary fiction also leads to its collapse. Chapters become scenes; chapter entries become rising curtains; summaries become prologues for a scene that waits beyond the threshold. One sees it in Zola, Howells, Kate Chopin …. But the seeming culmination appears when Henry James, in the 1890s, avows that he is bound to “the scenic method.” James’s career is one of the most illuminating representations of the arc of the scene-and-summary novel, and its climax appears at the end of the nineteenth century. From there, with late James, one senses a resurgence of romance in the form of narrative lyricism, and one begins to wonder whether pace will be dissolved in that lyrical expanse.

scholarly journals The preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities in the nineteenth century

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Geraldo Magela Cáffaro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Henry James

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p265Esse artigo explora referências ao teatro em prefácios de Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne e Henry James. Ênfase é dada à forma como esses autores empregam figuras como o mestre de cerimônias e o dramaturgo para alcançar seus públicos e projetar imagens autorais. As figuras em questão são historicizadas e discutidas sob a luz dos conceitos identificados pelos termos performativo e teatro de imagens, e o argumento proposto é o de que referências ao teatro revelam tensões entre a autoexposição e a autoproteção, assim como entre a afirmação da autoridade e sua subversão e fragmentação na escrita de prefácios no século XIX.

Perpindahan dan Perubahan : Transportasi dalam Struktur Naratif Riwayat Perjalanan ke Amerika di Era Viktorian

Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Henry James ◽  
World View ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Transportation Infrastructure ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Infrastructure System ◽  
The Subject

ABSTRAKRiwayat yang disajikan penulis Britania era Viktorian tentang perjalannnya ke Amerikamengasumsikan adanya sebuah jaringan prasarana transportasi. Sistem transportasiterkait dengan riwayat perjalanan (travel narrative) dalam tiga hal, yaitu (1) sebagaibasis material bagi perjalanan, (2) sebagai substruktur riwayat, dan (3) sebagai pokokpembicaraan dalam riwayat itu sendiri. Buku Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)merupakan model bagi cara infrastruktur transportasi menentukan aspek naratologis,yaitu urutan dan perspektif dalam struktur naratif riwayat perjalanan. Karya tersebut jugamenyajikan transportasi sebagai pokok pembicaraan dalam teksnya itu sendiri walaupun tidaksejauh sebagaimana yang tampak pada The Amateur Emigrant (1895) karya Robert LouisStevenson. Dalam hal ini, The American Scene (1907) karya Henry James juga relevankarena, walaupun tidak secara gamblang membicarakan transportasi sebagai topik dantidak pula menampakkan ciri-ciri riwayat perjalanan, karya tersebut merepresentasicara wawasan Britania-Amerika trans-Atlantik dianggap sebagai sesuatu yang lumrah.Wawasan ini juga memandang menganggap perjalanan trans-Atlantik sebagai semacamperjalanan menembus waktu, yang menunjukkan ketidaknyaman para penulis Britaniaabad kesembilanbelas terhadap transformasi sosial ke masyrakat demokratis yangdirepresentasi secara metaforis oleh pemahaman mereka tentang Amerika.Kata kunci: catatan perjalanan Viktorian, transportasi, wisataABSTRACTNarratives presented by Victorian British writers about their travels to America assume theavailability of a transprtation infrastructure system. Such a system is related to the travelnarrative in three things, namely, (1) as a material base for travel, (2) as a narrative substructurehistory, and (3) as the subject-matter of the narratives. Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Mannerof the Americans (1832) is a model for the way transportation infrastructure determinesnarratological aspects, namely order and perspective in the structure of the travel narrative.The piece also presents transportation as a subject-matter in its text although it does notgo so far as do Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895). In discussingtransportation Henry James’ The American Scene is also relevant because, despite it’s notexplicitly speaking of transportation as a topic nor does it show the convential characteristicsof the travel narrative, the work represents a British-American trans-Atlantic world viewas a given. This world view also considers trans-Atlantic travels as a kind of voyage acrosstime, implying the discomfort of nineteenth-century British writers concerning the socialtransition into a democratic society represented by America as a metaphor.Keywords: Victorian travel narrative, transportation, tourism

Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (235) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anthony Splendora
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Carrier Wave ◽  
The Rose ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
As If

AbstractIlluminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

scholarly journals Nineteenth Century Public And Private Spheres

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-117
Author(s):  
REMINA SIMA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Kate Chopin ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract The aim of this paper is to illustrate the public and private spheres. The former represents the area in which each of us carries out their daily activities, while the latter is mirrored by the home. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are two salient nineteenth-century writers who shape the everyday life of the historical period they lived in, within their literary works that shed light on the areas under discussion.

scholarly journals Depicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Humera Iqbal ◽  
Saba Zulfiqar
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Authors

The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

The Portrait's Subject

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thomas Eakins

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

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