The Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Tate
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
British Culture

The nineteenth-century novel in English is frequently defined by a theological shape. Fiction was sometimes regarded with suspicion by Christian readers, particularly those shaped by the legacies of the Puritan tradition. Yet alternative understandings of the pervasive influence of evangelical culture emphasize a more complex relationship with the novel, even after the advent of the ‘Higher’ biblical criticism. The chapter builds on Callum Brown’s analysis of what he names the ‘salvation economy’: a matrix of evangelical sermons, hymnody, and popular narrative shaped British culture in the nineteenth century. Conversion, fundamental in evangelicalism, is also a frequent trope in popular fiction. The chapter examines the animating presence of Christian thought in novels by, for example, Charles Dickens, Mary Ward, Emma Jane Worboise, and the Brontë sisters. The chapter gives particular focus to George Eliot whose fiction challenges assumptions regarding the apparent binaries of faith and scepticism and sacred and profane.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-94
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Continuous Sequence ◽  
Antecedent Condition ◽  
British Culture

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

Decolonizing the Novel

Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-146
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Multiple Domains

This chapter reviews the critics cited by Franco Moretti in his landmark essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” and analyzes them against the grain of his argument. Moretti argues that critics from Meenakshi Mukherjee and Kōjīn Karatani to Roberto Schwarz and Doris Somer similarly contend that the novels of the nations they study were pale or defective imitations of “Western” originals. Henry Zhao, whom Moretti hales with particular enthusiasm, has unfortunately internalized an idea about omniscient narration that cannot be found in “Western” realism. The chapter provides a description of the narrators of William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot by the earlier critics, including Henry James. Criticism of the novel and the novel itself have given readers worlds enough; the nineteenth-century novel, like those that preceded and followed it, gave readers one hugely ruptured but continuous world in which they are, as imperial liberal subjects, always in more than one place at the same time, always inhabiting multiple domains in person or by proxy.

Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Höglund
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Offender ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
British Culture

This chapter ties Richard Marsh’s Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband (1895) to the anxiety surrounding the degeneration debate. Simultaneously crime novel, detective novel and Gothic fiction, Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband mobilises the discourses of eugenics and criminal anthropology as they were articulated by figures such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso. The chapter argues that the novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that arguably informed late-nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike much other late-nineteenth-century fiction, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.

Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-94
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
English Language ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This chapter explores the re-imagining of the Italian refugee during the early Risorgimento. Victorian works by Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning register a new discomfort with Italian place that corresponds to the displacement of thousands of Italians from their home countries as conflict intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses on two English-language novels by Italian refugee Giovanni Ruffini, a former Young Italy member who fictionalises his own involvement in the movement in 1830s Piedmont and flight into exile in Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and depicts a returned Sicilian exile’s participation in the 1848 revolutions in Doctor Antonio (1855), to argue that Ruffini makes exile a constitutive feature of Italian political identity and re-writes the Italian landscape by mapping out the tracks of the dispossessed patriots who were expelled from their homes and communities during this period.

George Eliot: Immanent Victorian

2005 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE GALLAGHER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Constant Deviation

ABSTRACT Using Middlemarch as its primary instance, this essay argues that George Eliot's realism (and by extension nineteenth-century British realism generally) contains a tension between reference (to types of extradiegetic persons) and realization (which is aligned with the fictionality of novelistic characters). The dynamic of Eliot's novels involves the constant deviation of characters away fromtypes and toward fictional particularity, and it thereforematches a more general turn in British culture away froma desire for salvation conceived of as spiritual or ideational transcendence and toward a longing to attain a state of immanent existence that escapes the requirements of ““meaning.””

scholarly journals Literature That Saves: Matilda as a Reader of Great Expectations in Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 416-427
Author(s):  
Rafał Łyczkowski
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Times ◽  
British Culture

The article reflects on the therapeutic and ethical potential of literature, the theme which is often marginalized and overlooked by literary critics, in the novel Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Matilda, the main character of the analyzed novel, finds salvation in the times of war and oppression thanks to Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, Great Expectations, and the only white man on the Island − her teacher, Mr. Watts. Matilda’s strong identification with Dickensian Pip (their similarities and differences) and imagination make her escape to another world, become a self-conscious person and reunite with her father. The paper also discusses relationships between Matilda, Mr. Watts (her spiritual guide and creator of her story, who presents the girl with expectations for a better future) and her mother, Dolores. I attempt to show the emotional development of the characters, their interactions, changes, sense of identity (significant for both Jones and Dickens), and, having analyzed their actions, I compare them to protagonists created by Charles Dickens (Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella). Needless to say, drawing the reader’s attention to British culture and traditions, Lloyd Jones avoids focusing on the negative aspects of the postcolonial views, pointing out that “the white man” can be an example of a Dickensian gentleman.

Jonson’s Reception

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Substantial Influence ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

This chapter surveys Jonson’s impact on the nineteenth century, tracing out his substantial influence on poets, novelists and theatre professionals on the page and on the stage. In 1990, D. H. Craig wrote: ‘Jonson’s work, for the nineteenth century, was bafflingly inconsistent.’ This chapter, looking in detail at the way in which writers such as Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope interacted with and learned from Jonson, argues that his work did offer a consistent point of departure for important trends in nineteenth-century writing. By examining such specific encounters, and the work done by William Poel in reviving Jonson’s plays for the professional theatre at the end of the century, this chapter continues to reshape our sense both of the power and persistence of Jonson’s literary influence in the centuries after his death.

“The German, the Sclave, and the Semite”

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-541
Author(s):  
Tatiana Kuzmic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Creation

This essay contributes to George Eliot scholarship by examining the author’s interest in Eastern Europe, which spanned the length of her literary career, and its portrayal in her fiction. It situates Eliot’s Eastern European characters—from the minor ones, such as Countess Czerlaski’s late husband in “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” (1857), to major protagonists, such as Will Ladislaw of Middlemarch (1871–72)—in the context of England’s policy toward Poland vis-à-vis Russia during the course of the nineteenth century. The international political backdrop is especially useful in illuminating the Polish aspect of Middlemarch, whose publication date and the time period the novel covers (1829–32) happen to coincide with or shortly follow the two major insurrections Poland launched against Russia. Drawing on Eliot’s interactions with Slavic Jews in Germany, the essay shows how the creation of Will Ladislaw and his reprisal in the character of Herr Klesmer in Daniel Deronda (1876) serves the purposes of Eliot’s imagined cure for English insularity.

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