The Victorian Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Sally Blackburn-Daniels ◽  
William Baker
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Samuel Butler ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Mixed Genre

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.

XIII The Victorian Period

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 702-857
Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Christian Dickinson ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
Lucy Barnes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Samuel Butler ◽  
Novel Section ◽  
Victorian Period

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.

XIIIThe Victorian Period

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Pond ◽  
Elizabeth Parker ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Victorian Period

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.

Empty Houses

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Private Individual

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

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.

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Variety ◽  
The Third ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Moonstone

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.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Hegel, Derrida, George Eliot, and the novel

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Gerhard Joseph
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Novel
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