Social Identity and Literary Form in the Victorian Novel: Race, Class, Gender and the Uses of Genre
- ISBN-10
- 1476646864
- ISBN-13
- 9781476646862
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 281
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2022-07-28
- Publisher
- McFarland
- Author
- Jill Franks
Description
Enormous social changes during the Victorian era inspired some of the finest novels in the English language. In the final decades of the century, rigid application of gender rules and class hierarchies began to relax. Consciousness of the injustice of class- and gender-based discrimination was growing. Meanwhile, bias against nonwhite peoples was worsening. The British used scientific racism to justify their relentless expansion in Africa and Asia. Viewing Victorian literature through the lens of these social changes gives the modern reader a fresh way to interpret the novels and to appreciate their relevance to contemporary issues. Nineteenth-century novelists deployed realism, satire, and the bildungsroman to resist or support leading ideologies of their time, including the separate spheres doctrine and British supremacism. Each chapter is an elaboration of the author's university lectures about Victorian classics. The tone is scholarly yet conversational, directed to the undergraduate student as well as the general reader or Victoriaphile. The text presents concepts in interdisciplinary cultural studies, discusses the uses of genre for rhetorical and social purposes, and exposes paradoxes of the era. The coherent style, abundant examples, discussion questions, and literary glossary make this book a valuable supplement for readers of the Victorian novel.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2022-07-29
- 281 pages
- Paperback
- McFarland
Similar books
-
Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature
By Ruth Robbins, Julian WolfreysSocial and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature Ruth Robbins, Julian Wolfreys. Rabinow, Paul, 85,90, 96 n. 14 Ragussis, Michael, 79 n. 1 'Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: Harrington and the Novel of Jewish ...
-
Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction
By Audrey Jaffe... 100n, 115 Moretti, Franco, 132n, 153n, 163 Most, Glenn W., 72, 73n Mulvey, Laura, 34 Nationalism, 17, 129–30, 133, 138–40, 142, 153. See also Identity Newton, Κ. Μ., 135n Nietszche, Friedrich, 82n Nord, Deborah Epstein, 3n Nunokawa, ...
-
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
By Dennis Denisoff, Talia SchafferProblem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Ohio State UP, 2007. Jordan, Jane, and Andrew King, editors. Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture. Ashgate, 2013. King, Andrew. “Impure Researches, or Literature, ...
-
English Literature in Context
By Paul PoplawskiThe Victorian Serial. ... Literature and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. ... Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form from 1832–1867.
-
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel
By Lisa RodenskyDespite the fulminations against the novels in the mainstream press, Deborah Wynne points out that, ironically, ... 23 Bradley Deane, The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (London: Routledge, ...
-
Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice
By Susan Sniader LanserAthough women helped to make the novel a powerful social vehicle in the period from 1847 to 1860 that Nancy Armstrong ... in nineteenth-century England and France, at just the moment when the novel was becoming a serious literary form; ...
-
Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction
By Kylee-Anne HingstonJekyll and Hyde does indeed follow the pattern of narrative prosthesis: Hyde's indescribably deformed body and his violent, antisocial behaviour instigate the storytelling; his entanglement with Jekyll, incomprehensible to Utterson, ...
-
Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
By Clare Walker Gore... with the (few) existing studies of disability in literature mainly clustering around the Victorian period. ... as we know the concept, is really a socially driven relation to the body that became relatively organized in the ...
-
Secret Selves: Confession and Same-sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography
By Oliver S. BucktonConfession and Same-sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography Oliver S. Buckton ... in terms of both the volume of autobiographies written and published and the diversity of social groups achieving representation in this literary form .
-
Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925
By Dr Cathrine O FrankYet in its outright manipulation of the law, Mr. Scarborough's Family is totally unlike either novel. ... Mr. Scarborough s Family begins with a brief history of events central to the development of the story. Mr. Scarborough ...