REALISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (12) ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Latifa Karam Ahmadova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Literary Trend

In England, realism was formed very quickly, because it appeared immediately after the Enlightenment, and its formation occurred almost simultaneously with the development of Romanticism, which did not hinder the success of the new literary movement. The peculiarity of English literature is that in it romanticism and realism coexisted and enriched each other. Examples include the works of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. However, the discovery and confirmation of realism in English literature is primarily associated with the legacy of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). The works of Charles Dickens differ not only in the strengthening of the real social moment, but also in the previous realist literature. Dickens has a profoundly negative effect on bourgeois reality. Key words: England, realism, literary trend, bourgeois society, utopia, unjust life, artistic description

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Flint
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Transnational Modernity

This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. The book shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world. Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, the book traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. It describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. The book explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America. The book argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

scholarly journals So you've heard of the Gaskell medal: but who was Gaskell?

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-188
Author(s):  
Digby Tantam
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Social Club ◽  
North And South

The benefaction for the award of an annual medal and prize to a member of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association was made by Mrs Elizabeth Holland, in memory of her brother, Samuel. She was herself a remarkable woman, who married a banker, had ten children, translated poetry from the German, began a social club for unemployed men, founded a cottage hospital, and was well-known for her wit, conversation and unflappability. However, she came from a remarkable family. Her older brother, William, was a noted Unitarian minister, philanthropist, and writer. Her sister-in-law, William's wife, was Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, author of North and South, Wives and Daughters, and a celebrated, and for a season notorious, Life of Charlotte Brontë, as well as several other novels and short stories. Two of Elizabeth and William's children, Meta and Julia, were so well-loved in Manchester that flags flew at half-mast on their deaths.

THE SQUAB AND THE IDLER: A COSMOPOLITAN – COLONIAL DIALOGUE IN THE CALCUTTA STAR BETWEEN WILLIAM THACKERAY AND JAMES HUME

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-406
Author(s):  
Gary Simons
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
English Language ◽  
Small Body ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Henry Mayhew

The first English language newspaper in India began publication in 1780; by 1857, almost two hundred papers and periodicals had appeared – and many had quickly disappeared. An 1839 article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette partially attributed this high mortality rate to a lack of talented writers and to a desire among colonists for news from England: There is not here as there is in London, a class of professional literati, always ready to prepare a certain supply of matter. . . . [T]he London paying system has been introduced, but the writer whose contributions are worth paying for, are a very small body. . . . To all the drawbacks already mentioned we must mention another of no trifling influence; we allude to the disposition in our countrymen to look homewards for their literature. (Chanda xviii-xxi) Indeed, English newspapers of the time featured the contributions of literati such as Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Leigh Hunt, Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew, and William Makepeace Thackeray, but of these figures only Thackeray wrote purposely for an Indian periodical.

scholarly journals Telegraphic Realism: Henry James's In the Cage

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (5) ◽  
pp. 975-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Menke
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of Victorian realism. With In the Cage James proves to be more alert than such predecessors not only to the social and technological mechanics of telegraphy but also to the significance of mediation—in telegraphy as well as in realist fiction. Analyzing the conjunction this essay calls “telegraphic realism” indicates the ways in which a medium's imaginative possibilities may change over time and suggests the connections between the histories of media and of literature.

scholarly journals The Catholic Revival in English Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol IX(257) (75) ◽  
pp. 17-20
Author(s):  
O. Boinitska
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Solid Ground ◽  
Wide Readership ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Number Of Authors

The article deals with research of the Catholic revival as a remarkable literary movement that amalgamated a number of authors who discussed problems of the Roman Catholicism in the works of various forms – from serious theological apologies to the popular genres like G.K. Chesterton's detective stories. Such Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene appeal to the wide readership and interpret the problem of faith in its complex ambivalence, actuality, psychological depth. Whilst Evelyn Waugh is in search for a solid ground in the Old Faith as an alternative to the modern anarchy and chaos, Graham Greene emphasizes on the faith's conflicting ambiguities and contradictions.

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