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This engaging volume provides readers with the essential criticism on nineteenth-century poetry, organised around key areas of debate in the field. The critical texts included in this volume reflect both a traditional and modern emphasis on the study of poetry in the long nineteenth century. These are then tied up by a newly written essay summarising the ideas and encouraging further study and debate. The book includes: sections on Periodization; 'What is Poetry?'; Politics; Prosody; Forms; Emotion, feeling, affect; Religion; Sexuality; and Science work by writers such as William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins critics and historians including Isobel Armstrong, Richard Cronin, Jason Rudy, Joseph Bristow and Gillian Beer Detailed introductions and critical commentary by Francis O'Gorman, Rosie Miles, Stefano Evangelisto, Natalie Hoffman, Martin Dubois, Gregory Tate Providing both the essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis, this book is the perfect guide to students who wish to engage in the exciting criticism and debates of nineteenth-century poetry.
The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is an experiment in post-Jungian literary criticism and methodology. Its primary aim is to challenge current views about the correlation between narrative structure, gender, and the governing psychological dilemma in four nineteenth-century British novels. The overarching argument is that the opening situation in a novel represents an implicit challenge facing not the obvious hero/heroine but the individual that Terence Dawson defines as the "effective protagonist." To illustrate his claim, Dawson pairs two sets of novels with unexpectedly comparable dilemmas: Ivanhoe with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights with Silas Marner. In all four novels, the effective protagonist is an apparently minor figure whose crucial function in the ordering of the events has been overlooked. Rereading these well-known texts in relation to hitherto neglected characters uncovers startling new issues at their heart and demonstrates innovative ways of exploring both narrative and literary tradition.
Envisioning today’s readers as poised between an impossible attempt to read texts as their original readers experienced them and an awareness of our own temporal moment, Simon Dentith complicates traditional prejudices against hindsight to approach issues of interpretation and historicity in nineteenth-century literature. Suggesting that the characteristic aesthetic attitude encouraged by the backward look is one of irony rather than remorse or regret, he examines works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Morris and John Ruskin in terms of their participation in significant histories that extend to this day. Liberalism, class, gender, political representation and notions of progress, utopianism and ecological concern as currently understood can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Just as today’s critics strive to respect the authenticity of nineteenth-century writers and readers who responded to these ideas within their historical world, so, too, do those nineteenth-century imaginings persist to challenge the assumptions of the present. It is therefore possible, Dentith argues, to conceive of the act of reading historical literature with an awareness of the historical context and of the difference between the past and the present while allowing that friction or difference to be part of how we think about a text and how it communicates. His book summons us to consider how words travel to the reality of the reader’s own time and how engagement with nineteenth-century writers’ anticipation of the judgements of future generations reveal hindsight’s capacity to transform our understanding of the past in the light of subsequent knowledge.
Hilary Fraser provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of English prose in the nineteenth century which draws from a wide variety of fields including art, literary theory and criticisim, biography, letters, journals, sermons, and travel reportage. Through these works the cultural, social, literary and political life of the twentieth century - a period of great intellectual activity - can be charted, discussed and assessed. For the first time, an inclusive critical survey of nineteenth-century non-fiction is presented, that traces the century's ideological and cultural upheavals as they are registered in the literary textures of some of its most widely read and influential writings.The book explores the relations between writers who are generally perceived as occupying different discursive spheres, for example between John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale and Mrs Beeton; between Cardinal Newman, Elizabeth Gaskell and Hannah Cullwick; and between Charles Darwin, David Livingstone and Henry Mayhew. The establishment and development of different genres and their interactions over the century are clearly mapped. The genre of the periodical essay, a distinctively modern and flexible form catering to the mass readership, is the subject of the introduction, and then more specialist fields are discussed, covering scientific writing, travel and exploration literature, social reportage, biography, autobiography, journals, letters, religious and philosophical prose, political writing and history.
"We think of the nineteenth century as an active age - the age of colonial expansion, revolutions, and railroads, of great exploration and the Great Exhibition. But in reading the works of Romantic and Victorian writers one notices a conflict, what Stefanie Markovits terms "a crisis of action." In her book, The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Markovits maps out this conflict by focusing on four writers: William Wordsworth, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, and Henry James. Each chapter offers a "case-study" that demonstrates how specific historical contingencies - including reaction to the French Revolution, laissez-faire economic practices, changes in religious and scientific beliefs, and shifts in women's roles - made people in the period hypersensitive to the status of action and its literary co-relative, plot."--BOOK JACKET.
These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist.
"In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression."--Provided by publisher.
In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.