scholarly journals Adaptive Transformations: Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Novels

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Amy E Holley-Cribbin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Academic Level ◽  
Stage Adaptations ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Criminal Culpability

This study analyses nineteenth-century stage adaptations of Victorian novels. It argues that doing so, provides an important insight into the way that nineteenth-century society engaged with and responded to proto-feminism. A selection of nineteenth-century stage adaptations of three novels, which were both popular at the time and have subsequently become canonical, are analysed. The thesis focuses on how dramatists responded to the germinal proto-feminist elements in the novel when they transferred the plot of the original source to the stage. In Chapter One, the issue of female agency is looked at in the nineteenth century stage adaptations of Jane Eyre. Chapter Two focuses on the figure of the ‘fallen woman’ in the shape of Isabel Vane, Mrs Henry Wood’s central figure in East Lynne. Finally, in Chapter Three the complex issue of madness, criminal culpability and femininity is examined in the stage adaptations of Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Despite the attention devoted to the novels by feminist critics, the study of these popular adaptations has received comparatively little attention. One of the plays examined in this thesis has never been examined at an academic level before (The Mystery of Audley Court by John Brougham 1866). Building on the pioneering work of Patsy Stoneman, this thesis contributes to the growing interest in popular plays. The argument of this thesis is that by studying popular adaptations it is possible from both a New Historicist and a proto-feminist perspective to identify how nineteenth-century society engaged with and responded to proto-feminism. The key findings of this thesis are to do with the amount of license that the dramatists gave themselves as they went about adapting the original source to the stage, for example, the characteristics of the main characters are altered, characters are omitted and new characters are created and inserted into the plot, themes are removed or highlighted and it is the argument of this thesis that those changes were made due to contemporaneous events.

scholarly journals Aquatic Matter: Water in Victorian Fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-255
Author(s):  
Ursula Kluwick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Representations Of Nature ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

Abstract This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of water scenes from Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Dracula, water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their environment.

scholarly journals Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Shaghayegh Moghari
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

Literary Chronicles of the Qajars’ Epoch

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-173
Author(s):  
Gulnar Aqiq Jafarzade
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Literary Environment ◽  
Source Materials

Abstract Following a historical appraisal and the progress of literature and poetry during the Qajar era, this article focuses on the specific literary environment in nineteenth century. As literature has effect in all areas such as cultural, social and other affairs, it is important to remember that Qajars’ rulers Fathali Shah and Nasiraddin Shah had an influential role in the comprehensive evolution of the literary environment in this period. Literary chronicles covered the works written during Qajar dynasty can be considered the most important sources for researching literary processes. Circle of poets inside and outside of the court led the new founded literary movement “bazgasht” (“Return”), turning to the their predecessors for the inspiration in this period. The most important and wealthy genre of literature were tazkiras (biographical books of anthology), based on the original source materials in Arabian, Persian, and sometimes in Turkish, especially written about poets and poetry.

Lady Audley’s Secret

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Conventional Picture

It only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.’ When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley’s past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael’s nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert’s darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley’s Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon’s portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked.

Race Rescue

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 34-68
Author(s):  
Richard Eves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Fallen Woman

Abstract This paper examines Methodist missionary discourse in Papua at the turn of the nineteenth century, locating two themes: what I call a pathology of desire, to be found in the polemical missionary discourses directed at sexuality, immorality and licentiousness, and a pathology of culture, to be found in their polemical discourses against abortion, infanticide and child-rearing practices. Together, these pathologies were seen as the main causes of population decline. The two discourses, constantly at play, produce a doubled image of Papuan women – the fallen woman and the bad mother – which, it was considered, necessitated the intervention of “a civilising mission.” This involved race rescue – the isolation of those thought vulnerable (children and young women) on the mission station, away from the dangers of the villages, at the same time instilling in them their own notions of sexual morality, and above all the training of Papuan women in European models of motherhood and domesticity, so they would become good wives and mothers.

Traditionalism and Revelation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Francesca Aran Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Biblical Anthropology

Traditionalism is the doctrine that God revealed himself to our first parents, and this revelation is the source of our knowledge of God: ‘the knowledge’, as London cabbies still call it, was passed on from its original recipients down the generations. Our knowledge of God is thus mediated through tradition; its only direct source is a divine revelation made to our original forebears. Traditionalism thus tends to accentuate that we cannot know God through our own efforts, for instance by philosophical proofs. Transmission from a single original source explains the analogies between religions and mythologies, while the ‘telephone game’, or ‘Chinese whispers’, over the millennia explains the diversities. Invented in the nineteenth century, traditionalism was at once a contribution to theory of religions, a piece of biblical anthropology, and a theory of revelation and its development. Traditionalists have held that without an original, igniting act of divine revelation to our first ancestors, it would be impossible for the human race to become a knowing, speaking creature, to create institutions, and act morally, or to obtain knowledge of God.

“What Comes From Men and Women Dancing”

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fictional Representations

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.

The Romance

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-92
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Oriental Tale ◽  
Male Authority ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter demonstrates how nineteenth-century literature transcended religious frameworks and questioned the nature of male authority and feminine purity. Although the houri may have been based on assumptions about Islam, the term “houri” eventually was applied to Jewish and Christian women. The chapter surveys mentions of the houri in the form of the “Oriental tale” and argues that writers made use of the figure of the houri to present their own ideas of idealized Christian and Jewish women. Texts in the chapter include poems by Byron, Ivanhoe, Jane Eyre, Algerine Captive, Book of Khalid, engravings, and American monthly magazines for ladies.

ON THE TRACK OF THINGS: SENSATION AND MODERNITY IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON'S LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Badowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Moment

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

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