Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé and the Narrative of Popular Revolt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-178
Author(s):  
Biliana Kassabova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Jules Valles ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Communal Politics

In this article, I look at Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé to argue that its narrative style performs the politics of anonymity at the heart of the Paris Commune. To do this, I analyse three key elements of the novel – its autofictionality, its fragmentation and its ubiquitous present tense. By rejecting the exemplarity inherent in autobiography, this autofiction avant la lettre implies that the I of the narrator Jacques Vingtras, himself a stand-in for the author Jules Vallès, can be substituted with any other I. In the ‘révolution anonyme’ of 1871, there can be no leader; in its narrative, the central character is replaceable. The fragmentary writing further resists the unity of nineteenth-century novels to draw portraits of various actors of revolt; centralised revolution is abandoned in favour of communal politics. Finally, the narration in the present tense creates a sense of immediacy which rejects the glorification of the revolutionary past, and instead underscores the Paris Commune’s new politics in the making. The novel is thus enacting the ‘grande fédération des douleurs’ to which it is dedicated.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Time Migration ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Social Invisibility ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

scholarly journals Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Professional Ideology ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Realist Methodology ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Literary Techniques

AbstractThis essay attempts to open up our perspective on novels’ use of medical narrative realism. Previous analyses of “medicine and the novel” have focused on a common realist ideal and on novels with medical content. But even a realist methodology shared by the novel and by medicine did not find common expression in both genres. Accordingly, this paper draws on some examples that are representative of nineteenth-century novels and range from literal discussions of disease to scenes much farther removed from literal depictions of medicine or disease, but which still, I am arguing, draw on narrative techniques associated with medical clinical realism for their effect. In fact, novels revised and redirected such techniques, often using them against the grain of the professional ideology from which they arise. Accordingly, this essay will sketch out not only how medical case histories can use supposedly literary techniques, but also how nineteenth-century novels apply the narrative methods of clinical medicine even where medicine is not strictly at issue, and how they adapt those methods to their own literary aims.

Rethinking the Narrative in Fe en Disfraz: Latin American Female Slave Stories from Violence to (Self)-Emancipation

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Joseph McClanahan
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Slave

Abstract As with her previous novels, Mayra Santos-Febres explore the often-complex (inter)connections between men and women in Fe en disfraz (2009). In this novel, she takes her readers on a historical exploration into Latin America’s Colonial slave past, intertwining this history with the 21st century. The novel revolves around two Caribbean historians, who are living and working in Chicago, María Fernanda Verdejo, known as Fe, and Martín Tirado and serve as guides on this journey linking the present-day to the past. Through an entanglement of stories, relationships, and historical reflections, Santos-Febres creates a distinctive narrative which helps the reader on this literary expedition. As such, this article addresses how the author’s narrative style combined with reverberations of a bleak period in Latin American history come together to re-contextualize the violent female slave narratives in order to focus on their emancipation, and ultimately, to reveal how the central character vocalizes her own desire to be emancipated from these echoes of the past.

Aspects of the Novel

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Modern British Literature ◽  
First World

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

scholarly journals Representation of the True Discipleship in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10S) ◽  
pp. 96-98
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Holy Book

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) a nineteenth century American female writer, rose from a religious family and enrooted in Calvinism preached by her father Lyman Beecher, she pictures the true disciple of Christ in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom, a blackish slave of Kentucky plantation in the year 1840 who plays the central character and he owns only the Bible. Throughout the novel he often found reading it with great religious feeling and quotes it to educate Eva, Cassy, and others to find the strength to survive in their trials. This paper aims to observe the characteristics features of the true disciples with reference to the Bible. As the bible says, in Colossians 3:22 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord”. The Holy book says that humans ought to treat one another as they themselves wish to be treated. Uncle Tom and Eva are true martyrs of love, compassion, sacrifice and obedience. They stand as a symbol of saintliness, representation and a true disciple of Jesus Christ

The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Losano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Transition ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Critics of Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) have frequently noted the artistic endeavors of the novel's heroine, Helen Graham, yet they have not fully considered the historical and narratological ramifications of Helen's career as a painter. This essay argues that Helen's artworks cannot be considered as mere background to the novel or as simply symbolic reflections of the heroine's (or the author's) emotions. Instead, we must see the scenes of painting in Tenant as indicators of the novel's radical view of women's role as creative producers during a particularly complex moment in art history, one in which early-nineteenth-century female amateurism began its gradual transition from amateur "accomplished" woman to the professional female artist——a historical transition that, as is suggested in readings of various nineteenth-century novels, is in its earliest stages at precisely the moment of the writing and publication of Tenant. At the narrative level, the novel's many scenes of painting provide its readers with detailed, if oblique, guidelines for interpretation; the novel is formally and ideologically impacted by the presence of its painter-heroine. Most particularly, such a reevaluation of the role of painting in the novel resolves a central critical debate over the novel's problematic narrative structure.

“Reading” in Great Expectations

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

The theme of education pervades nineteenth-century novels, often particularized in the theme of learning to read and write. Great Expectations reveals the complex metaphorical nature of the terms “reading” and “reader,” deepening our sense of how Pip's moral perceptions are related to his literal education. The novel begins with several scenes in which Pip learns to read and then goes on to show a wide range of characters reading rightly or wrongly, dramatically or narrowly, with self-deception or with charity. Dickens' own reader comes to see that the stages of Pip's expectations correspond to the growth in his powers of interpretation.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

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