Why Can’t Duddy Go Home Again?

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Gerald Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
The Family ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Continuum

In the continuum of Canadian comic fictions reaching back to the early nineteenth century, in the academic context of its study, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is Mordecai Richler’s most important novel. That tradition contains three towering figures, their authors’ signature characters: Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick in The Clockmaker of 1836, Stephen Leacock’s Josh Smith in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town of 1912, and Richler’s Duddy Kravitz of 1959. All three come to troublesome and troubling ends. In the final pages of Duddy Kravitz, things fall apart badly for Duddy. He has betrayed his surrogate family, comprising Yvette and Virgil, and refuses to go home in the family car. Regarding the refusal, neither Duddy nor the narrator answers father Max’s pointed “Why?” “Never mind why,” says Duddy. This essay minds why. It answers that Duddy may well have been planning to go back to Yvette for one more try at reconciliation, which would have been a momentous event. But he is distracted by a waiter’s offering to run a tab for him, thereby recognizing Duddy’s material success. Had Duddy gone home to Yvette and his only hope of return to true family, the novel would have ended comically rather than tragically. As it is, Duddy Kravitz is left slouching towards his useless old home with his hopeless family, homeless.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Seeing “No Guiltless Minds”

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-67
Author(s):  
Noa Reich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Vicarious Liability ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ancient Law ◽  
Vicarious Experiences ◽  
Corporate Liability ◽  
Legal Theorist

Noa Reich, “Seeing ‘No Guiltless Minds’: Inheritance and Liability in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale” (pp. 30–67) This essay suggests that the articulation of inherited guilt as a type of liability in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) invites us to reframe inheritance as central both to the Victorian credit economy and to the period’s fictional engagements with the effects of this economy. I begin by examining mid-nineteenth-century legal and political debates about limited corporate liability and estate debts, as well as legal theorist Henry Sumner Maine’s account of succession in Ancient Law (1861), which rests on an analogy between the family and the corporation. With their tropes of transmitted guilt, these discussions point to anxieties arising from the law’s construction of inherited identity as simultaneously individual and intergenerational, a paradox that both refracts and challenges nineteenth-century liberal contractual notions of identity. Armadale explores these issues through its depiction of the testator-heir dynamic as indeterminately singular and double, its association of inheritance with speculative ventures and impersonation, and its vacillation between affirming and limiting intergenerational liability. But it also fosters an alternative, mediating form of responsibility, which I call vicarious liability: a substitutive, imaginative liability both prompted and reinforced by the novel’s competing narrative perspectives and shifting or ambiguous focalization, as well as its embedded letters, diaries, and the depiction of reading as a path to identification with another’s guilt. Armadale’s take on inheritance may thus be read as a proposal for what the novel itself offers a hyper-contractual modernity: a framework for engaging in vicarious experiences of liability.

Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge, Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family

1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
N. W. Alcock ◽  
C. T. Paul Woodfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Social Importance

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

An Introduction to the Life of Conrad Martens

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Older Brothers ◽  
The Family ◽  
The City

The story of Conrad Martens begins in London in the early nineteenth century, when on 21 March 1801, a third son and fourth and youngest child was born to a merchant of German origins, J. Christopher Heinrich Martens, and his English wife, Rebecca née Turner. The family lived above their premises in the crowded old trading quarter of the city in a street called Crutched Friars, near the present day site of Fenchurch Street Station. ‘Having no taste for mercantile pursuits’, as Conrad Martens put it many years later, all three Martens boys became artists, despite the family's European traditions as merchants going back to the fifteenth century. Influenced by his older brothers, Conrad, at the age of sixteen, became a pupil of the well-known English landscape painter and teacher Anthony Van Dyke Copley Fielding.

Sending Flowers into the Mirror: Jinghua yuan as Metafiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-431
Author(s):  
Liangyan Ge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Examination System ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Civil Service Examinations

Abstract This study offers a reading of the early nineteenth-century Chinese novel Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Flowers in the Mirror) by Li Ruzhen 李汝珍 (1763–1830?) as a fiction about fiction making. Contextualizing the novel in a society where the civil service examinations are among the most important cultural institutions, this article considers the protagonist Tang Ao's 唐敖 voyage to bizarre, fantastical islands, narrated in the early chapters of the novel, as an account of his conversion from examination scholarship to fiction creation. From these islands, his symbolic realm of fictionality, he sends flower spirits-turned-girls to China for the female examinations, here interpreted as an enterprise to fictionalize the examination system. Thus the narrative of the girls' participation in the exams and ensuing celebrations in later chapters becomes a fiction within the fiction. Discussing the dynamic between the examinations and fiction writing elevated in the metafictional structure of the novel, this study considers Tang Ao a fictional representative of many scholars in late imperial China, whose experience with the examinations was not merely a cause of intense frustration but also an inexhaustible source of literary inspiration.

Numbers

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Regular Practice

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Jeffrey Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Christian Discourse

This essay analyzes the discourses of spirituality represented in Jane Eyre within the context of the Evangelical upheaval in the Britain of Charlotte Brontë's childhood and the mixing of supernatural with Christian elements in the "popular religion" of early-nineteenth-century British rural society. In addition to a dominant Christian spiritualism and a supernatural spiritualism, however, a third discrete discourse is identified in the text-the discourse of spiritual love. The novel stages a contest between these three competing discourses. Christianity is itself conflictually represented, being torn between the repressive, masculine Evangelicalism of Mr. Brocklehurst and the healing communion (among women) represented by Helen Burns and the figure of "sympathy." The supernatural is equally conflicted: it is shown to empower Jane and to be a necessary vehicle for bringing Christian discourse in contact with the discourse of spiritual love, but then it is denied and left, like the madwoman in the attic, as the excluded term. Finally, spiritual love is offered by the text as that which solves these contradictions, revising and merging Christianity and the supernatural to produce a rejuvenated spirituality, one that fosters what is conceived of as the "whole" person, her need for mutual human relationship, her spiritual needs, and her desire.

scholarly journals Lucy Steele, the Mistress of Sense and Sensibility, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

MANUSYA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Choedphong Uttama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sense And Sensibility ◽  
Social Debate

This paper interprets Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) in the context of the literary and social debate about “sense” and “sensibility” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the concept of sense was viewed with a suspicious eye as it might lead sensible persons to machination and manipulation; and, sensibility with a disapproving one as such it had been throughout the tradition of the anti-sentimental novel. This paper thus aims to argue that the portrayal of a female antagonist Lucy Steele who unites assumed sensibility and prudent, selfserving sense to achieve her ambitious aims shows that the novel was responsive to the belief promoted by the antisentimental works that sensibility could be feigned and used to dupe others and at the time rejected the idea that (too much) sense is a desirable quality.

scholarly journals A “Defect of Justice”: Congregationalism, the Calvinist Problem, and the Unitarian Solution in Sylvester Judd's Margaret

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Woods
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Village Society ◽  
Over Time

This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop through the example of Livingston. The new Unitarian-congregationalist model Livingston adopts in discarding Calvinism suggests Judd’s resolute faith in Winthrop’s original Congregationalist mission. Judd does not imagine a radical Utopia, but instead offers a more pragmatic reform that is fundamentally Unitarian in its emphasis on humanity's essential goodness and limitless capacity for moral improvement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document