Literary influence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
The Many ◽  
Porous Boundaries

The dangers posed by French novels were not simply moral: they were also literary. Critics throughout the period compulsively listed any indication that a Victorian novel had been influenced by French novelists. The many writers involved with the sensation fiction of the 1860s challenged the purity (both moral and formal) of English novels. Comparisons between sensation novels and their French antecedents led to a reconsideration of the assumed superiority of English life and culture. Sensation novelists did not always proclaim their French inspirations, but many were keen to identify themselves as followers of Balzac, who had set important precedents for the genre, and whose literary star was rising in England. The boundaries of the English novel were further tested by acts of plagiarism committed by novelists like Braddon and Reade; in challenging critics to untangle the composition of their work, they demonstrated the porous boundaries of domestic literary traditions.

scholarly journals The Concept of Victorianism in A. S. Byatt’s “Posession”

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Current Research Interest

The late 1990s – early 2000s was a time of numerous projects dedicated to the Victorian age and the Victorian novel as a specific phenomenon that inspires the modern novel development. The English postmodern novel with its typical narrative, time transferal to Victorian England, weaving of time layers, invokes current research interest. The relevance of this study is caused by considerable interest of researchers in the Victorian era heritage and by need of a comprehensive study of Victorian linguoculture and its implementation in the modern English novel. The Victorian text influences a new genre of the novel that reflects the gravity of modern English prose to the traditional literature of Victorian era, assumed to be particularly important in this context. The analysis of A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” in the Russian literary criticism was made only by O. A. Tolstykh; in the Ukrainian science, this work was investigated by O. Boynitska in the context of searching the past, so this subject is not investigated enough, and in our opinion is new and relevant, especially from the perspective of the “Victorian era” concept embodied in the novel. The aim of the paper is to analyze the “Victorian era” concept peculiarities in the intercultural context, on the basis of A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” as a Victorian novel. The paper takes into account the reproduction of concepts of Marriage, Home, Family, Freedom, Life, as components of “Victorian era.” The Victorian family is often represented through the place of their dwelling; therefore, the great Victorians’ works are overwhelmed by interior descriptions (Dombey’s house, Miss Havisham’s home, Mr. Rochester’s Castle). However, in “Possession,” there is an obvious contrast of Victorian buildings to the same structures in the XX century: the past prime – the modern decline. All the secrets and delusions hidden behind the facades of supposedly respectable buildings result in distorting facts and, to some extent, to violating the rights of ownership to the memories of the past. This gives another meaning to the title of the novel – “possession,” that is ownership, possession of letters, memory, truth.

Stevenson’s Careful Observances

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Arata
Keyword(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
The Many

Abstract In his own time, Robert Louis Stevenson was admired as a careful technician of language, a stylist to be put in the company of de Quincey or Pater. In our time, he is known primarily as the author of potboiling plot-driven Gothic tales and adventure yarns. Stevenson himself saw no contradiction in pursuing what Lionel Johnson called his “stylistic nicety and exactitude” in fiction aimed at the mass market, but critics both then and now have largely sidestepped the question of how to reconcile these twin allegiances. In this essay I read The Wrecker (1892), arguably the most densely plotted of Stevenson’s novels, as an extended meditation on the historicity of words. The novel continually calls attention to the “refractive” quality of certain keywords around which the story is structured. At the same time, The Wrecker is concerned with the dynamics of narrativity. It is concerned not just with the procedures by which fictional events are translated into intelligible story, but also with the many ways in which narratives are generated through collaboration: between writers and the literary traditions they work in, between writers and words in their historicity, between writers and their readers—real, imagined, and unforeseen.

FORGETTING THACKERAY AND UNMAKING CAREERS

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-545
Author(s):  
Amanpal Garcha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Many

One of the peculiar challengesfacing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. TheMLA Bibliographycontains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature –Desire and Domestic Fiction(1987) andThe Novel and the Police(1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson'sThe Powers of Distance(2001), Sharon Marcus'sBetween Women, and Alex Woloch'sThe One vs the Many(2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether fromThe English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence(1970).

POSSESSING DRESSES: FASHION AND FEMALE COMMUNITY INTHE WOMAN IN WHITE

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casey Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Female Community ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Comparative Treatment ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White(published serially 1859–1860) toGreat Expectations(published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

The Abbé Prevost and the English Novel

PMLA ◽  
1927 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Foster
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Abbe Prevost ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Emotional Effect ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

The true nature of the so-called Gothic novel has been misunderstood, and the problem of its origin rendered unnecessarily difficult in consequence of a classification which takes only one of the many features into account. The critics who have hit upon supernaturalism as the most distinctive and significant element, have done this in spite of the fact that a part of the body of the fiction they pretend to describe is plainly controlled by a rationalism that forbids anything more than a mere toying with the appearances of the marvellous. No procedure of the authors of such novels is more usual than the lifting of the mask when the mysterious scene has gone far enough to produce its emotional effect. To insist upon the usual classification is to render oneself incapable of differentiating between the Radcliffian novel on the one hand, and Otranto, the Monk and the German Schauerroman on the other.

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.

scholarly journals Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Graves ◽  
Elizabeth Rechniewski
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Indian English ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Many ◽  
The 19Th Century

The ambition of this issue of Portal is to reach across the methodological boundaries of history, politics, literature and geography to apply their complementary perspectives to the study of identity and its relation to space and place, an aim that involves attempting to identify the many different ways the notoriously slippery concepts of identity and geography may intersect.For this issue we have selected articles that cast a fresh perspective on two areas where identity and geography intersect: the construction of identity through the imaginative recreation of place in literature: Mapping Literary Spaces; and the study of the shifting relationships of centre and periphery, exclusion and inclusion in urban settings and geopolitical confrontations: Social and Political Peripheries.Gerard Toal has written that geography is not a noun but a verb: it does not describe what space is but studies what we do with space, imaginatively and politically. The articles in this issue illustrate the exercise of the literary and political imagination and the role of materiality and memory in the creation of geographic representation. They show too a new awareness of the centrality of space in the constitution of identities, and the need for a new geocritical reading of its discourse, as the interrelations of place and community are played out on the many scales of social and political life, from the local to the global. The special issue is organised thus:IntroductionMatthew Graves (Aix-Marseille University) & Liz Rechniewski (Sydney University): “Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities.”I. Mapping Literary Spaces- Isabelle Avila (University of Paris XIII), "Les Cartes de l'Afrique au XIXe siècle et Joseph Conrad : Perceptions d'une Révolution Cartographique."- Daniela Rogobete (University of Craiova), "Global vs Glocal: Dimensions of the post-1981 Indian English Novel."II. Social and Political Peripheries- Elizabeth Rechniewski (Sydney University), “The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australian views of New Caledonia in the 19th Century."- Annie Ousset-Krief (Paris III), "Le Yiddishland newyorkais."- Carolyn Stott (Sydney University), "Belleville: Space, Place and Identity."- Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield), "Silencing Deafness: Marginalising Disability in the 19th century." 

How Bunyan Became English: Missionaries, Translation, and the Discipline of English Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Hofmeyr
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islands ◽  
English Literature ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
International Image ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
John Williams ◽  
The Many

On 31 October 1847, the John Williams, a ship of the London Missionary Society, left Gravesend for the Pacific Islands from whence it had come. Its cargo included five thousand Bibles and four thousand copies of The Pilgrim's Progress in Tahitian. Like other such mission ships, the John Williams had been funded by the pennies and shillings of Sunday school subscription and had become a huge media spectacle. It was but one of the many international propaganda exercises at which mission organizations so excelled.This picture of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678 and 1684) at the center of an international web is an appropriate one. Written in the wake of the English Revolution, the book had rapidly been disseminated to Protestant Europe and North America. By the late 1700s, it had reached India and by the early 1800s, Africa. Yet, some one hundred years on, this avowedly international image of The Pilgrim's Progress had been turned inside out. From being a book of the world, it had become a book of England. Today, John Bunyan is remembered as a supremely English icon, and his most famous work is still studied as the progenitor of the English novel. Roger Sharrock, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, best exemplifies this pervasive trend of analysis. His introduction begins by acknowledging Bunyan's international presence, but this idea is then snapped off from the “real” Bunyan who is local, Puritan, and above all English.

scholarly journals “THE FASHIONS OF THE CURRENT SEASON”: RECENT CRITICAL WORK ON VICTORIAN SENSATION FICTION

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Beller
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Current Season ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Ellen Wood ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Sensation Novels

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Ifill
Keyword(s):  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Moral Management ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Many

The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.

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