XIIIThe Victorian Period

Author(s):  
Kristen Pond ◽  
Elizabeth Parker ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
...  

Abstract This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3.Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Kristen Pond with the assistance of Elizabeth Parker; section 2 is by Lois Burke with the assistance of Ana Alicia Garza, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Caroline Radcliffe; section 6 is by William Baker. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, section 6 contains material on George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies previously found in the General and Prose section, and on Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Meredith, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Walter Pater previously found in other sections. Also included in section 6 are miscellaneous and cross-genre items and additional items that arrived too late to be included elsewhere in this chapter. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott.

Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Sally Blackburn-Daniels ◽  
William Baker

Abstract This chapter has five sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History, and Drama; 5. Miscellaneous. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; sections 4 and 5 are by William Baker. In somewhat of a departure from previous accounts, this chapter concludes with a mixed-genre section that covers Samuel Butler Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. This is followed by a section containing additional materials that came too late to be included elsewhere. These sections have been contributed by William Baker, who thanks for their assistance Dominic Edwards, Olaf Berwald, Beth Palmer, Sophie Ratcliffe, and Caroline Radcliffe.


2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 702-857
Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Christian Dickinson ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
Lucy Barnes ◽  
...  

Abstract This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke with assistance from Christian Dickinson, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Lucy Barnes; section 6 is by William Baker. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Steven Amarnick, Richard Bleiler, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies, previously found in the General and Prose section, and the Brontës, Samuel Butler, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, and Anthony Trollope, previously found in the Novel section, will be found in section 6, Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre, as will materials that came in too late to be included in other sections.


Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-146
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood

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.


Author(s):  
Audrey Murfin

Abstract By considering the multiple frames in and around My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell and “The Yellow Mask” by Wilkie Collins, this paper examines the tradition of British short stories that were structurally, but not thematically, modeled on the folktales known in England as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Use of the Nights makes Victorian short fiction coherent by providing an alternative to the linear structure of the novel. This common structure is notable for the following characteristics: a deferral of knowledge and endings, repeated thematic elements across frames and stories, and embedded metafictional narratives that gesture towards oral traditions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Meadows ◽  
Jay Clayton

Although the Victorian period gave birth to a strong tradition of critique of technology and industrialization, it also fostered a counter-tradition: a new and generative technological imaginary. In recent years, scholars of Victorian culture have begun to map out this technological imaginary in readings of canonical Victorian novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. This chapter surveys this recent critical work, then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864) as an example of how technologies of communication and transportation become vehicles for rich intersubjective exchanges, generating narrative structures that link characters and novels to one another in complex webs mimicking Victorian Britain’s network of rails, wires, and postal routes.


Author(s):  
Joanne Shattock

This chapter traces the growth of the periodical press from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Victorian period, emphasizing the explosion in the number of weekly and monthly publications that serialized fiction. It demonstrates the interconnections between the professionalization of authorship in the Victorian period and the buoyant periodical press. The editorship of a weekly or monthly magazine was a role undertaken by a number of writers, providing a regular income in addition to fees earned from individual works. Poets too profited from publication in magazines, but it was mainly novelists, whose works often first appeared in weeklies and monthlies and who combined reviewing the work of others with creative writing at some point in their careers, who benefited most from the press. Writers discussed include Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Tennyson.


Author(s):  
Shaqayeq Moqari ◽  
Nooshinn Elahipanah

The novel Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell is a novel which deconstructs the values of the Victorian society. In fact this novel devalues the values of this period by bucking the system of Victorian norms and values. This is manifested in the change of Ruth from a naïve to mature girl through her fall. In fact her fall makes her wise. When she dies she is given a funeral which is given to a virtuous woman. Her funeral is a slap on the face of the Victorian ideals of goodness and badness. This tells us that the values should be revised when such a person is not that much bad while she is considered bad. Gaskell devalues the values of Victorian society through her heroine’s migration and her living under a false name to teach us a lesson as to how shaky the Victorian ideas are and should be checked again. In fact, this novel has contributed, though little, to the way a woman like Ruth should be viewed.


Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.


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