Reading for success: the professional plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 169-218
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Romance Plot

In the last two chapters we have read some key moments in Scharf’s life with and against two dominant cultural narratives: the romance plot and the differentiation plot. These plots are intimately but complexly related to literary genres– the marriage-plot novel and the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses not so much on a single plot as on a culturally privileged place that has generated a variety of literary plots. By telling the story of Scharf’s relationship with two great country houses only seven miles apart, we cannot help invoking the frisson-inducing spectre of the Gothic and sensation novel and the linked cultural and literary plot of inheritance. Scharf’s relationships with Knole, the home of the Sackville family, and Chevening, the seat of the earls of Stanhope (both located in Sevenoaks, Kent), brought up for us some of the central questions of Gothic and sensation novels: who belongs to the house, and who does not? Who is absorbable into the household, and who, finally, is foreign to it and must be thrust out into a different space, whether that be a prison, an asylum or another country?1

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert McParland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Cultural Measures ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Reading for romance: the marriage plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 62-117
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
The Rich

So far we have structured the story of this project around an originary narrative and, indeed, a moment of origin– our encounter with George Scharf’s album of menus and invitations that served as our introduction to him (see Fig. 1.1). Certainly that origin shaped our initial sense of George as a guest, a diner out. If we had not always had before us the glowing after-image of the menus, the gilded names of country houses and the calling cards of the rich and famous, we would perhaps have read the diaries differently: we might have read George not only or primarily as a guest but also as a host. Although, as we describe in the introduction, we found traces of Scharf as a host in the album and in the nightmare of hospitality we construed from those traces, the album resolutely and snobbishly tied him to country estates and their social rituals. The diaries, however, show Scharf as an almost obsessive giver of dinners, small and large, and as the centre of what one guest called ‘The Ashley Place Circle’, a group of male friends defined by the address of the lodgings Scharf rented for the last two and a half decades of his life.

‘The End is No Longer Hidden’: News, Fate and the Sensation Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-123
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Novelistic Form

Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel--a sub-genre known for fast-paced plots drawn from real life--as symptomatic of the newspaper’s growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Mansel conflated this new novelistic form—which he called ‘The Newspaper Novel’--with crime news. This chapter argues, however, that the sensation novel makes the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion, one that problematises similar exclusions practiced by Dickens and Trollope. By experimenting with newspaper time and form, as well as the temporal structure of narrative, these sensation novels highlight characters whose experience of time and community is not presentist, as Anderson suggests, but rather more akin to dynastic time and a sense of history beyond the nation. Throughout Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels, the newspaper becomes a part of the mysterious, the uncanny, and ‘atmospheric menace’ for which the sensation novel is so famous. Rather than drawing upon newspapers for a sense of realism, as critics have argued, these novels make their newspapers integral to their providential plots.

Victorian Values

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinah Birch
Keyword(s):  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Difficult Times

The contested values associated with the term ‘Victorian’ call for fresh and informed consideration in the light of far-reaching changes brought about by the global economic downturn. Victorian writers engaged with public questions that were often associated with the issues we must now address, and their vigorously contentious responses reflect a drive to influence a wide audience with their ideas. Fiction of the period, including the sensation novels of the 1860s, provide telling examples of these developments in mid-Victorian writing; but non-fictional texts, including those of the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill and the critic John Ruskin, also question the foundations of social thought. As they challenged traditional genre boundaries through the innovative forms that emerged across a range of diverse works, many Victorian authors argued for closer links between the discourses of emotion and those of logic. These are difficult times for researchers and critics, but the stringencies we find ourselves confronting can provide opportunities to create connections of the kind that the Victorians chose to make, bringing together different genres of writing and disciplines of thought, and arguing for a more generous understanding of our responsibilities towards each other.

Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

The Datalogical Drug Mule

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Data Capturing ◽  
Legal Structures

Borders and bodies are increasingly regulated by data-capturing mechanisms spread across the world through information and communication technologies. This article traces the features and implications of such a border-body datalogical entanglement through the figure of the drug mule. It analyzes government documents and recorded case studies to argue that this figure emerges from an assemblage of cultural narratives, legal structures, human labor, technical practices, and biological processes. The datalogical drug mule is already implicated in a struggle over what, and how, data is meaningful and actionable. Investigating this figure allows us to begin disentangling the data-driven mechanisms that constitute modern borders and bodies while at the same time accounting for analog continuities in contemporary practices of border security.

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