: Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels . Robert A. Colby. ; Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction . David Howard, John Lucas, John Goode. ; Minor British Novelists . Charles A. Hoyt.

1968 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-405
Author(s):  
E. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

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.

scholarly journals The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South

Romanticism ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH WOOTTON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Byronic Hero ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
North And South

Almost two hundred years after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero remains, as Andrew Elfenbein argues, an ‘unprecedented cultural phenomenon’.1 This essay is not concerned with the more direct descendants of the Byronic hero (Rochester and Heathcliff, for example); rather, I shall be focusing on the less immediately obvious, and in some respects more complex, reincarnations of the Byronic hero in two nineteenth-century novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Establishing previously neglected connections between these authors and the figure of the Byronic hero not only opens new avenues of debate in relation to these novels, but also permits a reassessment of the extent and significance of Byron's influence in the Victorian period. The following questions will be addressed: first, why does a Byronic presence feature so prominently in the work of nineteenth-century women writers; second, what is distinctive about Eliot and Gaskell's respective treatments of this figure; and, third, how is the Byronic hero subsequently reinvented, and to what effect, in modern screen adaptations of their work?

Weak Whites: Yellow Fever in Three Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-55
Author(s):  
Robin Anita White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
George Washington ◽  
George Washington Cable ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
The Voice

Since the eighteenth century, yellow fever has had a racialized history in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Americas stemming, in part, from the disease’s origins in West Africa. There was a misconception that blacks were less likely to fall victim to the disease. This article establishes the theories around contagion and susceptibility, showing that whites, especially foreigners, were thought to be at greater risk for what was called the “Strangers’ Disease.” It then analyzes three nineteenth-century novels about New Orleans wherein yellow fever plays an important role. Two of the novels are quite well known: The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) by George Washington Cable and Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889) by Lafcadio Hearn. The third novel, Amitié et dévouement, ou Trois mois à la Louisiane (1845) by Camille Lebrun, although virtually forgotten, is especially important as it represents the voice of a French woman writer whose views on race differ from those of the two other authors.

A Geography of Medical Knowledge: Country Doctors in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-708
Author(s):  
MARK STOREY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

This essay examines two of the best-known postbellum representations of country doctors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884). While they have often been considered from a feminist point of view, this essay seeks both to complement and to argue against these existing readings by bringing a specifically geo-medical framework to bear on the texts. I consider both the thematic and the generic implications of representing country doctors in the postbellum era, exploring how they reflect, refract and encode the state of medical knowledge in postbellum America. I argue that literary representations of country doctors can contribute to an understanding of postbellum medical modernization by decentring it – by, in a sense, allowing us to comprehend the course of modern medical knowledge from a place usually assumed to remain outside modernity's transformations. Whilst I do, therefore, approach both these novels from a loosely new historicist perspective, I also want to think about how the social context they were engaging with determined, constrained and embedded itself into the thematic, formal and generic makeup of the novels themselves. Ultimately, this essay not only offers fresh readings of two important late nineteenth-century novels, but makes an intervention within the wider debates about nineteenth-century medical history and geography.

Writing into Modernity

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
John Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Character Identity ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Chapter 3 situates Edith Wharton’s guidebook The Writing of Fiction within a culture of advice that traverses the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essay argues that Wharton’s text formulates relational, comparative aesthetics that place contemporary modernist experimentation (such as stream of consciousness narration) within novelistic traditions developed the nineteenth century. Additionally, The Writing of Fiction emphasizes twentieth-century novelistic investigation of character subjectivity that challenges nineteenth-century novels’ portrayals of characters in relation to their historical conditions. While Wharton’s guidebook has often been read as a reflection upon her own writing practices, this essay submits that within a genre of advice about writing, Wharton’s guidebook addresses a wider conceptual field: the novel’s exploration of character identity within modernity.

Words Stare like a Glass Eye: From Literary to Visual to Disability Studies and Back Again

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (5) ◽  
pp. 1315-1324
Author(s):  
Tobin Siebers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
New Era ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

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