Nineteenth Century British Literature Then And Now

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.

Explores the works, writers, and movements that shaped the British literary canon from the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Anthony Trollope's novels and stories entertain while vividly bringing the Victorian era to life. His deep empathy for the underdog led him to subvert conventions, exploring the lives of women, as well as men, and choosing as heroes and heroines outsiders who would be viewed with suspicion by his readers. Trollope's profound insight to human nature made him the first novelist in English to develop three dimensional characters and to create the novel sequence. This literary companion introduces readers to his life and work. A-to-Z entries explore Trollope's short story collections, and nonfiction contributions, as well as important themes in the works. This companion also includes fresh voices of contributors that bring in their contemporary insights to bear on Trollope's achievements, facilitating the understanding of Trollope's perspectives in relation to feminism, queer studies, and transnationalism.

This book focuses on the representation of the practitioner of the occult in mid to late nineteenth-century British literature. The occult was a source of emotional support and scientific curiosity during this time of change and uncertainty because it seemed to offer answers to both spiritual and scientific questions through measurable, albeit unconventional, means. However, the occult was also viewed as a threat to British society, an assault on it values, and a fundamental danger to emerging scientific enterprise. By examining the ways in which the occult and its practitioners are represented in British novels from 1850-1900, this book traces the ways that the novels commented on, participated in, and contributed to the racialization of the occult that occurred throughout the nineteenth century in Britain. The representations of the occult characters in these novels interpreted and transmitted the social, political, economic, and scientific discourses about race in the nineteenth century to the reading public, as well as participating in the discourse surrounding race and the occult.

In Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature, Lesa Scholl explores the ways in which the language of starvation interacts with narratives of emotional and intellectual want to create a dynamic, evolving notion of hunger. Scholl's interdisciplinary study emphasises literary analysis, sensory history, and political economy to interrogate the progression of hunger in Britain from the early 1830s to the late 1860s. Examining works by Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Mayhew, and Charlotte Bronte, Scholl argues for the centrality of hunger in social development and understanding. She shows how the rhetoric of hunger moves beyond critiques of physical starvation to a paradigm in which the dominant narrative of civilisation is predicated on the continual progress and evolution of literal and metaphorical taste. Her study makes a persuasive case for how hunger, as a signifier of both individual and corporate ambition, is a necessarily self-interested and increasingly violent agent of progress within the discourse of political economy that emerged in the eighteenth century and subsequently shaped nineteenth-century social and political life.

Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

This Combo Collection (Set of 3 Books) includes All-time Bestseller Books. This anthology contains : David Copperfield The Odd Women Villette