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.

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 Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

scholarly journals Translocal Anglo-India and the Multilingual Reading Public

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-298
Author(s):  
James Mulholland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Poetry ◽  
Anglo Indian

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

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 A Brief History of the New Constitutionalism, or “How We Changed Everything So That Everything Would Remain the Same”

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mandel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Unification

The Italians have a word for what I want to say about modern constitutionalism: “gattopardesco,” that is “leopardesque”, not as in the animal but as in the novelThe Leopardby Tomasi di Lampedusa. The novel is about a noble Sicilian family at the time of the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Italian unification was mainly a matter of the northern Savoy monarchy of Piemonte conquering the peninsula and vanquishing the various other monarchs, princes, etc., including the Bourbon rulers of Sicily and Naples. But there were other elements about and stirring up trouble, anti-monarchist and even socialist elements. In a scene early in the novel, the Sicilian Prince of Salina, the main character, is shocked to learn that his favourite nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, is off to join the invading northerners. He remonstrates with the boy:You're crazy, my son. To go and put yourself with those people … a Falconeri must be with us, for the King.

The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Huw Pryce
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Medieval Ireland

This chapter compares how the Irish and Welsh of the Victorian period engaged with their respective medieval cultures and histories. Although medieval Ireland and Wales both produced extensive and varied literatures in Celtic vernaculars and experienced English conquest that had major long-term consequences, they also differed in important respects. The same is true of the post-medieval histories of both countries. These differences in turn help to explain why uses of their medieval legacies by the nineteenth-century Irish and Welsh reveal significant contrasts. After outlining the contexts in which engagement with medieval culture and history took place, the discussion focuses on the significance attached to the Middle Ages in understandings of the Irish and Welsh pasts; idealizations of the medieval Church and secular rulers; medieval influences on art and architecture; and the editing and translating of medieval Irish and Welsh literary texts, together with medieval influences on modern literature.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Between Mars and Mammon; the East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Anglo Indian

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.

scholarly journals Organized Chaos: Cohesive Devices in Benjy’s Sections of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Aliz Farkas
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Explanation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Text Linguistics ◽  
Story Line ◽  
Systemic Functional Grammar ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of

Abstract As the history of criticism on The Sound and the Fury proves it, Benjy’s section is probably the most controversial part of the novel. Some literary critics and writers celebrated it as an excellent piece of literary art, the peak of writerly performance, while others felt confused and irritated over the trials it posed to the reader. Although critical voices that reproach the writer for the incoherence of Benjy’s narrative may be justified at first sight, a closer inspection reveals that it is much less incoherent than it appears. In my paper, I will argue that there are several ways in which the author helps the reader to construct a more or less coherent story line out of the fragmented events that happened in the course of about thirty years. Secondly, I want to demonstrate that functional-semantic approaches to text analysis, such as Systemic Functional Grammar or Text Linguistics, can be effectively employed in analysing and interpreting literary texts. Finally, I try to find a psychological explanation of how Benjy’s incoherence is made readable by the interworking between the coherence-seeking dispositions of the reader and the ingenious cohesive devices used by the writer.

scholarly journals The Gentleman as a Hero? (Mis)representations of Heroic Masculinity in W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 372
Author(s):  
Katri Sirkel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Implicit Assumption ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Controversial Nature

The aim of the article is to analyse the concept of gentlemanliness with regard to heroic masculinity in W.M. Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. Set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and written in the 1840s, the novel casts light on the controversial nature of the notion of gentleman. In the Victorian period, gentlemanliness came to be modelled on the principles of chivalry but there was nevertheless an implicit assumption originating from the Regency era that being a gentleman meant yielding to leisurely elegance rather than performing heroic deeds. Thackeray, whose formative years had passed in the Regency-tinted 1820s and early 1830s but who as a novelist gained maturity in the mid-nineteenth century, was acutely aware of the contradiction between the Regency and Victorian perceptions of gentlemanliness and the unease resulting therefrom. Thus, the paper argues that although the Regency standards of gentlemanliness were discarded as incompatible with Victorian heroic masculinity, they had a considerable influence on how heroism as a component of gentlemanliness was perceived in the Victorian era. The analysis of gentlemanliness focuses on the four principal male characters in the novel – Jos Sedley, Rawdon Crawley, George Osborne, and William Dobbin, of whom each represents aspects of gentlemanliness not entirely compatible with the Victorian heroic ideal. The article suggests that the characters take heroism as an asset for creating a heroic image rather than as a manifestation of heroic deeds, thus presenting vividly the contradiction within the concept of Victorian heroic masculinity.

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