Decolonizing the Novel

Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-146
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Multiple Domains

This chapter reviews the critics cited by Franco Moretti in his landmark essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” and analyzes them against the grain of his argument. Moretti argues that critics from Meenakshi Mukherjee and Kōjīn Karatani to Roberto Schwarz and Doris Somer similarly contend that the novels of the nations they study were pale or defective imitations of “Western” originals. Henry Zhao, whom Moretti hales with particular enthusiasm, has unfortunately internalized an idea about omniscient narration that cannot be found in “Western” realism. The chapter provides a description of the narrators of William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot by the earlier critics, including Henry James. Criticism of the novel and the novel itself have given readers worlds enough; the nineteenth-century novel, like those that preceded and followed it, gave readers one hugely ruptured but continuous world in which they are, as imperial liberal subjects, always in more than one place at the same time, always inhabiting multiple domains in person or by proxy.

XIIIThe Victorian Period

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Pond ◽  
Elizabeth Parker ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Victorian Period

Abstract This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3.Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Kristen Pond with the assistance of Elizabeth Parker; section 2 is by Lois Burke with the assistance of Ana Alicia Garza, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Caroline Radcliffe; section 6 is by William Baker. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, section 6 contains material on George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies previously found in the General and Prose section, and on Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Meredith, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Walter Pater previously found in other sections. Also included in section 6 are miscellaneous and cross-genre items and additional items that arrived too late to be included elsewhere in this chapter. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott.

CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELISTS

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-549
Author(s):  
Frederick R. Karl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Peter Ackroyd ◽  
Oxford University Press

IT IS TIME to assess where contemporary biographies of Victorian novelists are heading. With two more books about George Eliot, still others on Jane Austen, and another on Anthony Trollope, we see redundancy everywhere. As for other major figures, the Brontës have finally quieted down with Juliet Barker’s monumental biography; Dickens has settled in with Peter Ackroyd and Fred Kaplan, and whoever is waiting in the wings for another stab at his life is probably wise to await the completion of the magnificent Oxford University Press edition of the letters, now passing Volume 11.

Empty Houses

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Private Individual

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

The Victorian Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Sally Blackburn-Daniels ◽  
William Baker
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Samuel Butler ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Mixed Genre

Abstract This chapter has five sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History, and Drama; 5. Miscellaneous. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; sections 4 and 5 are by William Baker. In somewhat of a departure from previous accounts, this chapter concludes with a mixed-genre section that covers Samuel Butler Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. This is followed by a section containing additional materials that came too late to be included elsewhere. These sections have been contributed by William Baker, who thanks for their assistance Dominic Edwards, Olaf Berwald, Beth Palmer, Sophie Ratcliffe, and Caroline Radcliffe.

XIII The Victorian Period

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 702-857
Author(s):  
Ana Alicia Garza ◽  
Lois Burke ◽  
Christian Dickinson ◽  
Helen Williams ◽  
Lucy Barnes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
Samuel Butler ◽  
Novel Section ◽  
Victorian Period

Abstract This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke with assistance from Christian Dickinson, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Lucy Barnes; section 6 is by William Baker. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Steven Amarnick, Richard Bleiler, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies, previously found in the General and Prose section, and the Brontës, Samuel Butler, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, and Anthony Trollope, previously found in the Novel section, will be found in section 6, Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre, as will materials that came in too late to be included in other sections.

Vernon Lee’s Hideous Roman à Clef

Genre ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Matthew John Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
External Context ◽  
Critical Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Following Henry James, literary-critical practices presume the autonomy and integrity of the literary text. The roman à clef meanwhile troubles this autonomy by presuming a transparent and concrete relation between text and world. By turning to the late nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee, who elevates reference as a vital principle of all literary representation, this essay argues that the roman à clef challenges our assumptions about the value of reference. Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884), a roman à clef about British aestheticism, is treated as a privileged case study for reading this alternative history of the novel. By focusing on the provisionality of literature, which Lee calls a “half-art,” this essay argues that literature’s reference to an external context provides a point of departure for thinking about women’s disempowerment and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century British culture. At the same time, it argues that provisionality offers a model for considering the broader consequences of limitation and determination in the history of the novel.

Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-94
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
English Language ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This chapter explores the re-imagining of the Italian refugee during the early Risorgimento. Victorian works by Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning register a new discomfort with Italian place that corresponds to the displacement of thousands of Italians from their home countries as conflict intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses on two English-language novels by Italian refugee Giovanni Ruffini, a former Young Italy member who fictionalises his own involvement in the movement in 1830s Piedmont and flight into exile in Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and depicts a returned Sicilian exile’s participation in the 1848 revolutions in Doctor Antonio (1855), to argue that Ruffini makes exile a constitutive feature of Italian political identity and re-writes the Italian landscape by mapping out the tracks of the dispossessed patriots who were expelled from their homes and communities during this period.

Dominant Forms and Marginal Translations: Re-reading the Emergence of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432
Author(s):  
James Garza
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Local Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Definition Of

Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.

The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Re-Examination

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 911-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Tradition ◽  
The One

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.

The Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Tate
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
British Culture

The nineteenth-century novel in English is frequently defined by a theological shape. Fiction was sometimes regarded with suspicion by Christian readers, particularly those shaped by the legacies of the Puritan tradition. Yet alternative understandings of the pervasive influence of evangelical culture emphasize a more complex relationship with the novel, even after the advent of the ‘Higher’ biblical criticism. The chapter builds on Callum Brown’s analysis of what he names the ‘salvation economy’: a matrix of evangelical sermons, hymnody, and popular narrative shaped British culture in the nineteenth century. Conversion, fundamental in evangelicalism, is also a frequent trope in popular fiction. The chapter examines the animating presence of Christian thought in novels by, for example, Charles Dickens, Mary Ward, Emma Jane Worboise, and the Brontë sisters. The chapter gives particular focus to George Eliot whose fiction challenges assumptions regarding the apparent binaries of faith and scepticism and sacred and profane.

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