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.

Kafka's The Trial

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Abstract Language ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Anonymous System ◽  
Quest Narrative

The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multifaceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism. Written in a relatively abstract language, it tells the story of Josef K., who is accused of a crime he has no recollection of having committed (and whose nature is never revealed to him). The novel has often been interpreted theologically, expressing a form of radical nihilism in a modern world abandoned by God. However, it has just as often been read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the anonymous system he is facing) progressively leads to greater and greater confusion, ending with his execution. In this volume, the contributors deal with a range of issues arising in this work. Theology is central, and related to that are questions of justice, law, ethics, resistance, and subjectivity. All the contributors view the novel as responding to a context of rapid modernization, and questions of metaphysics intersect with the most mundane challenges of everyday life. There is here a fundamental uncertainty, a context of skepticism, that the contributors approach from a variety of angles.

scholarly journals Goethe’s “Welt” poet in Bengal: The Influence of World Literature on Jibanananda Das and other Bengali Poets of the 1930s-40s

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Firoze Basu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Original Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bengali Literature ◽  
International Circulation

This study aims to establish a link between the concept of “Weltliteratur” or World Literature, in terms of the free movement of literary themes and ideas between nations in original form or translation, and the Bengali poets of the thirties and forties who actively translated French and German poets. It identifies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) concept of World Literature as a vehicle for the Kallol Jug poets. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of “Weltliteratur” in a few of his essays in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. My emphasis will be on Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) arguably the most celebrated poet in Bengali literature who was well versed in the contemporary Western Canons of Poetry. Jibanananda’s defamiliarization of the rural Bengal Landscape, his use of exotic foreign images owe a debt to contemporary European poets. Interestingly, Jibanananda had reviewed an English translation of German author Thomas Mann’s novel “Dr Faustus’ for a Bengali magazine “Chaturanga”. In the Bengali review he states that despite prevalent misconceptions (some critics considering the novel to be superior to the original Faust epic by Goethe) Goethe’s Faust was the first text to capture the hope, despair and crisis in the modern world and articulate it in such a manner that “true” literature of the age was created in its new light. In Jibanananda’s estimation, Thomas Mann deserves credit for treating the Faust legend in a unique and creative way.

Stories Only Seemed Shorter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
News Media ◽  
Electronic Mail ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Trend ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Television Commercials ◽  
Daily News ◽  
The Past ◽  
Big Picture

This chapter considers the question of whether daily news over the past century has gone along with the modern trend of shorter news. When the occupation of journalist first emerged in the nineteenth century, realist news was mainly short, and everything in the modern world has seemed to go only faster for more than a century. First radio picked up the pace and then television followed, requiring shorter attention spans. Along came faxes, then electronic mail, and now video messaging. MTV made images move faster, television commercials got shorter, and online ads shrank to a few seconds. Critics call it sound-bite society or McDonaldization, reducing information to nuggets. However, studies show that news has been getting longer, moving away from brief realist descriptions of stand-alone events and aligning with modern impulses toward big-picture explanation. The trend occurred across legacy news media: newspaper reporters writing longer, television reporters speaking more, and even reporters on public radio, the home of extended news, talking more in longer stories.

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.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

Thérèse Raquin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

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