Suffering Daughters and Wives. Sentimental Themes in Finnish and Nordic Realism

This article examines sentimental themes and scenarios in Nordic nineteenthcentury literature, focusing on Finnish realism. The main claim of the article is that the treatment of the Woman Question in Nordic literature is thematically connected to French sentimentalism that depicted upper-class women caught in the conflict between personal freedom and familial duties. Typical scenarios were family barrier to marriage and love triangle, in which an unhappily married woman fell in love with another man. French sentimental social novels took a stance on the position of women. Similar themes and scenarios can be found in Nordic nineteenth-century novels and plays. The ‘daughter novel’ tradition from Fredrika Bremer’s The President’s Daughters (1834) to Minna Canth’s Hanna (1886) depict the sufferings of upper-class girls in patriarchal family and society. A Doll’s House (1879) by Henrik Ibsen centers on the theme of conflicting duties, depicting the moral awakening of a doll-like wife, and Papin rouva (1893, ‘The Wife of a Clergyman’) by Juhani Aho concentrates on the sufferings and moral considerations of the unhappily married Elli. The article suggests that the sentimentalist legacy informs the Nordic nineteenth-century literature and should be taken into account in the scholarship.

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Sentimental Avatars: Gender Identification and Vehicles of Selfhood in Popular Media From Nineteenth-Century Novels to Modern Video Games

Games and Culture ◽

10.1177/1555412019879812 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 155541201987981

Author(s):

Lisa Mendelman ◽

Rabindra A. Ratan ◽

Joseph Fordham ◽

Megan Knittel ◽

Oskar Milik

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Popular Media ◽

Sex And Gender ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Sentimental Literature ◽

Quantitative And Qualitative Research ◽

Quantitative Studies ◽

And Gender ◽

Nineteenth Century Novels

This article examines how the embodied experience of contemporary avatar use overlaps with 19th-century American sentimental literature and cultural assumptions about gender and readerly identification in that period. Drawing on recent quantitative and qualitative research on avatar use and ongoing scholarship on nineteenth-century literature, we offer theoretical insights about the resonance between historical and contemporary understandings of media consumption as it intersects with cultural notions of sex and gender differences. Theories of sentimentalism help us to reconsider how gender is conceptualized in quantitative studies of avatars. Our cross-disciplinary study of embodiment and visceral experience thus argues for expanding modes of inquiry within quantitative games scholarship to more fully capture the interplay between gender identity and individual factors in avatar experiences. We conclude with three strategies for quantitative games scholars to consider as a means to enrich our understanding of the complexities of gender in modern game contexts.

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Data, Maps, Networks – Digital Approaches to Reading (in) Nineteenth-Century Literature

American Studies Journal ◽

10.18422/71-02 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Regina Schober

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Two Dimensions ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Digital Culture ◽

Distant Reading ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Moby Dick ◽

Processing Information ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Novels

Recently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to ‘read’ the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work. More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of ‘readability’ and the ‘crisis of reading’, as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called “hyperreading” vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic’s formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading”, or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world.

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Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

10.1017/9781316855546 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Dickens and the Daughter of the House ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511484919.010 ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 233-234

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

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: Valerie Sanders ,The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) 223 pages, hardback, £50 (ISBN 0 333 74930 8); Valerie Sanders , ed.,Records of Girlhood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Childhoods(Aldershot: The Nineteenth Century Series, Ashgate, 2000), 239 pages, hardback, £39.50 (ISBN 0 7546 0148 X).

Journal of Victorian Culture ◽

10.3366/jvc.2004.9.2.274 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 274-279

Author(s):

Sarah Annes Brown

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

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Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.001.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Simon Goldhill

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Roman Empire ◽

Classical Antiquity ◽

Victorian Culture ◽

Wide Range ◽

Victorian Art ◽

Victorian Science ◽

Role Of Religion ◽

Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

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