scholarly journals Defining the Scope of Alexandre Dumas’s La Drame De La France: Problems, Considerations, and Debates

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Eric Martone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Literary Reputation

Alexandre Dumas’s interment in the Panthéon in 2002 prompted a steady reevaluation of his literary reputation, resulting in his increased prominence among his nineteenth-century peers. Several studies have resurrected Dumas’s 1857 argument that his works comprise a vast series entitled La Drame de la France. This argument has become so ubiquitous that it has become an uncontested fact. However, there are certain challenges in studying Dumas’s La Drame de la France. Dumas did not repeatedly make this assertion, which was announced toward the latter portion of his life, and whether it was something that consciously and continuously drove his plans when developing future ideas and concepts for his historical fiction novels is debatable. Therefore, while not disputing the existence of La Drame de la France, its nature (and the nature of its creation) nevertheless makes it so that which novels specifically comprise it has never been definitively established. Coming to some degree of consensus on this point is needed as a first step to advance studies of Dumas in this area. This article seeks to initiate this literary discussion by presenting Dumas’s 36 major historical fiction novels set in France, briefly examining the problems, considerations, and debates that exist in whether each could be accepted as part of the series.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Interlude: Interview with Maud Casey

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Tougaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Moral Treatment ◽  
Mental Experience

In this interlude, Tougaw and Casey discuss her novel The Man Who Walked Away in the context of cultural and historical fluctuations in the diagnosis of mental experience as pathology. The conversation ranges through discussions of Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, nineteenth-century theories of “moral treatment,” Casey’s approach to historical fiction and narration, and contemporary debates about diagnosis and labeling of mental illness.

scholarly journals Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Maria Lujan Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Upheaval

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Russo
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Feminist Agency

Anne Boleyn has been narrativized in Young Adult (YA) historical fiction since the nineteenth century. Since the popular Showtime series The Tudors (2007–2010) aired, teenage girls have shown increased interest in the story of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second and most infamous queen. This construction of Boleyn suggests that she was both celebrated and punished for her proto-feminist agency and forthright sexuality. A new subgenre of Boleyn historical fiction has also recently emerged—YA novels in which her story is rewritten as a contemporary high school drama. In this article, I consider several YA novels about Anne Boleyn in order to explore the relevance to contemporary teenage girls of a woman who lived and died 500 years ago.

Gay's Mastery of the Heroic Couplet

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-125
Author(s):  
Wallace Cable Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common View ◽  
John Gay ◽  
Literary Reputation

In his literary reputation, John Gay has been less fortunate than his neo-classic contemporaries; for, added to nineteenth century neglect, he received little support from Johnson himself, whose “Life of Gay” is harsh and unsympathetic. Today, except for the lyrics in “The Beggar's Opera” and the Fables, Gay's poetry is more talked about than read; and more has been written about his life and times than about any of his work. Even when he is occasionally judged as a poet, there is little genuinely critical agreement. At one extreme, for instance, Mr. F. R. Leavis brackets Gay with Parnell, and remarks that they “are representative period figures, of very minor interest.” This is the more common view. But at the other extreme, Mr. Yvor Winters places Gay among “the chief masters of the heroic couplet.” Since these are but passing estimates, a detailed examination of Gay's heroic couplet poems should perform for his reputation a service long over-due.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
The Impact

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.

Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Adaptive Reuse ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Historic Conservation ◽  
Adaptive Practice

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Frederic Jameson ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

“Before Our Eyes”: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading

2013 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Image ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay reads the seminal historical fiction of Walter Scott in conjunction with the medical apparition discourse that flourished in the early nineteenth century. It argues that the tactics of the historical novel in this period are best understood through an “apparitional poetics” that attempts to solve the problem of the historical image.

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