Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-371
Author(s):  
Irena Yamboliev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Sentence Level

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

The development of a modern prose style in Arabic literature

1989 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Cachia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Consummate Skill

The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known as badī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2 (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

Lafayette's Impossible Princess: On (Not) Making Literary History

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1077
Author(s):  
Nicholas Paige
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Evolution

The branch of literary history occupied with generic evolution customarily views masterworks as the drivers of formal change: their success causes later writers to follow their innovations. This article considers the case of the comtesse de Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves, which broke from received Aristotelian ideas on the use of history by focusing on an invented heroine; because the princess was invented, she blocked traditional reading strategies and allowed instead for readerly identification. It is tempting to conclude from this that the novel's innovations made it a harbinger of the future, an ancestor of the nineteenth-century novel. Yet writers of Lafayette's time did not follow her cue, and no trail leads from the princesse de Clèves to later fictive protagonists. Theories of literary evolution must take into account that in many cases there may be no reassuring causal relation between masterworks and broader literary practice.

Hazlitt's contrariness and familiar prose style: lessons on how to be critical

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Halpin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Conversational Style ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
Self Consistency

Contrariness of the kind manifest in the literary output and general disposition of the nineteenth century English essayist and journalist, William Hazlitt, has much to teach contemporary intellectuals working in the academy about how better to be critical, offering important lessons on the necessity for self-consistency and independence of thought and the need more to write for publication in a familiar and accessible conversational style.

scholarly journals Απ-εικονίσεις της Αμερικής

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Τατιανή Γ. Ραπατζίκου ◽  
Σμάτη Γενενετζή-Μαλαθούνη ◽  
Zωή Δέτση ◽  
Νικόλαος Μαυρέλος ◽  
Γιώργος Καλογεράς ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Current Volume

Επιμελήτριες τόμου: Τατιανή Γ. Ραπατζίκου και Σμάτη Γεμενετζή-Μαλαθούνη Ο παρών τόμος αποτελεί τη συλλογή ενός εισαγωγικού κειμένου, έξι δοκιμίων και ενός φωτογραφικού οδοιπορικού, τα οποία επιχειρούν να σκιαγραφήσουν την εικόνα της Αμερικής από το 19ο αιώνα μέχρι σήμερα όπως αυτή προσλαμβάνεται μέσω διαφόρων λογοτεχνικών, θεατρικών, κινηματογραφικών, ποιητικών και φωτογραφικών αναζητήσεων. Volume Editors: Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and Smatie Yemenedzi-Malathouni Each one of the essays contained in the current volume sheds light on America's image with attention paid to particular socio-cultural events and temporalities starting from the nineteenth century till the present day as these are explored via literary practice, theater, poetry, cinema and photography.

On Style in Victorian Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many

Some writers of the Victorian period, as well as more recent critics, have argued that the prose style of Victorian fiction aims to efface itself or that an absence of style may in itself represent the nineteenth-century ideal. This collection provides a major assessment of style in Victorian fiction and demonstrates that style - the language, techniques and artistry of prose - is inseparable from meaning and that it is through the many resources of style that the full compass of meaning makes itself known. Leading scholars in the field present an engaging assessment of major Victorian novelists, illustrating how productive and illuminating close attention to literary style can be. Collectively, they build a fresh and nuanced understanding of how style functioned in the literature of the nineteenth century, and propose that the fiction of this era demands we think about what style does, as much as what style is.

The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-204
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This chapter turns to W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and its deployment of nineteenth-century British literature. Du Bois himself tends to attract the adjective “Victorian” as a descriptor—of his intellectual formation, his prose style, his aesthetic, his morality—with greater frequency than virtually any other figure in the African American literary and intellectual tradition. The chapter shows that critics have been too quick to generalize about the presence of nineteenth-century British literature in Souls. They have rarely asked why Du Bois selected the specific authors, texts, and passages he cites or how these citations contribute to and intervene in a tradition of African American citation and intertextuality. Addressing these questions not only nuances our understanding of Du Bois's rhetorical strategy but also leads us to reconsider a seemingly settled question in the scholarship on Souls: the role Du Bois assigns culture in the fight for racial equality.

scholarly journals Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAMRAN RASTEGAR
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Persian Translation

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, ‘nationalism’ and ‘novelism’, and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as ‘the habitual subordination of writing to the novel’ – it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.

Studies in Contemporary Arabic Literature

1929 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-322
Author(s):  
H. A. R. Gibb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

In the preceding survey of Arabic literature during the nineteenth century, special emphasis was deliberately laid on two aspects of the subject, the struggle between the old and the new conceptions and ideals, and the gradual emergence of a. simplified Arabic prose style. If it is asked why a point of view apparently so narrow and exclusive should have been adopted, to the prejudice of a more detailed investigation of the personal and literary characteristics of the individual writers, the answer is twofold.

Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 888-906
Author(s):  
Laurie Langbauer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Future

This essay considers the poetry of the juvenile author Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), largely unstudied today but well known throughout the nineteenth century. Kirke White's work provides an example of the importance to juvenile writing of prolepsis—a trope that yokes immediacy to the future, employing a range of strategies including both anticipation and retrospection. Robert Southey's edition of Kirke White's Remains, coming on the heels of Southey and Joseph Cottle's edition of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition. Taking young Romanticera writers seriously now helps us recover how many young people published and how actively their writing was discussed. Romanticism's relation to juvenility can shape new hypotheses about literary practice and offer alternative understandings of tradition: the juvenile tradition, through a proleptic sense of its own immanence, anticipates its future critical neglect but indicates the retrospection and reinterpretation that will someday remedy it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document