The Flaneur in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

The Flaneur in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

Author: Isabel Vila-Cabanes

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1527519392

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The flaneur is a cultural and literary phenomenon usually associated with nineteenth–century Paris, but the type also exists in the artistic and literary panorama of other major European capitals, such as London, Berlin, and Moscow. Despite massive recent interest in the figure of the flaneur in scholarly studies, analyses about the nineteenth–century British analogue are often fragmentary, appearing in the form of isolated articles. However, there is an abundant amount of nineteenth–century novels, sketches and journalistic essays which offer remarkable and hitherto overlooked accounts of the British metropolis, and which frequently include the figure of the flaneur as a central character or the topic of flanerie as a theme. This book explores a great array of texts, making an essential contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the prehistory or, rather, history of the British flaneur from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, with a special focus on the nineteenth century. The flaneur is looked at as a figure in which the development and dynamics of the modern metropolis and its impact on the literary discourse are manifested from a formal, as well as thematic, perspective.


Urban Walking –The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film

Urban Walking –The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film

Author: Isabel Vila-Cabanes

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1648890563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The volume assembles fresh treatments on the flâneur in literature, film and culture from a variety of angles. Its individual contributions cover established as well as previously unnoticed textual and filmic source materials in a historical perspective ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The range of topics covered demonstrates the ongoing productivity of flânerie as a viable paradigm for the artistic approach to urban culture and the continuing suitability of flânerie as an analytic category for the scholarly examination of urban representation in the arts. This productiveness also extends to the questioning, re-evaluation, and enhancement of flânerie’s theoretical foundations as they were laid down by Walter Benjamin and others. The work will be particularly relevant for students and scholars of literary studies, film studies and gender studies, as well as for theoretical approaches to flânerie as an important aspect of urban culture.


21st-Century British Gothic

21st-Century British Gothic

Author: Emily Horton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-25

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350286583

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, including Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by contemporary writers to address the cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st-century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st-Century British Gothic can tests geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability and speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism.


Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author: Jonathan Potter

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-22

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 3319897373

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual experience. It argues that new visual technologies gave expression to new ways of seeing, using these to uncover the visual discourses that facilitated, informed and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. In doing so, the book reconsiders literary and non-fiction works by well-known authors including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, G.H. Lewes, Max Nordau, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Conrad, as well as shedding light on less-known works drawn from the periodical press. By revealing the discourses that formed around visual technologies, the book challenges and builds upon existing scholarship to provide a powerful new model by which to understand how the Victorians experienced, conceptualised, and wrote about vision.


New Directions in Flânerie

New Directions in Flânerie

Author: Kelly Comfort

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1000482340

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book distinguishes itself from previous scholarship by offering an inclusive and comprehensive treatment of urban walking from 1800 to the present. Divided into three sections—geography, genius, and gender—the introduction establishes the origins of the flâneur and flâneuse in early foundational texts and explores later works that reimagine flânerie in terms of these same three themes. The volume’s contributors provide new and global perspectives on urban walking practices through their treatment of a variety of genres (literature, film, journalism, autobiography, epistolary correspondence, photography, fashion, music, digital media) and regions (Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East). This volume theorizes well-known urban characters like the idler, lounger, dandy, badaud, promeneuse, shopper, collector, and detective and also proposes new iterations of the flâneur/flâneuse as fashion model, gaucho, cruiser, musician, vampire, postcolonial activist, video game avatar and gamer.


British Writers and Paris

British Writers and Paris

Author: Elisabeth Jay

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0199655243

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Using a wealth of contemporary sources, this book tells the story of the way in which the turbulent, hedonistic world of mid-nineteenth-century Paris touched the careers and work of a host of Victorian writers, major and minor. It attends both to the way writers actually experienced life in a capital city markedly different from London, and to how they retailed this to a swiftly-growing British readership. En route, it reveals the cosmopolitan world of the salonsand the social life of the British Embassy; demonstrates the risky competitive world of the freelance journalist; traces the developing role of the foreign correspondent, and examines the, sometimescontradictory, prejudices about Paris and the Parisians contained in contemporary fiction.Casting a wide literary net, the first part of this book explores these writers' reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Parisfor mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists, paying particular attention to the ways in which the young Thackeray's exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. Thefinal part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly-growing British readership.


The Way We Argue Now

The Way We Argue Now

Author: Amanda Anderson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1400826829

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do the ways we argue represent a practical philosophy or a way of life? Are concepts of character and ethos pertinent to our understanding of academic debate? In this book, Amanda Anderson analyzes arguments in literary, cultural, and political theory, with special attention to the ways in which theorists understand ideals of critical distance, forms of subjective experience, and the determinants of belief and practice. Drawing on the resources of the liberal and rationalist tradition, Anderson interrogates the limits of identity politics and poststructuralism while holding to the importance of theory as a form of life. Considering high-profile trends as well as less noted patterns of argument, The Way We Argue Now addresses work in feminism, new historicism, queer theory, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, pragmatism, and proceduralism. The essays brought together here--lucid, precise, rigorously argued--combine pointed critique with an appreciative assessment of the productive internal contests and creative developments across these influential bodies of thought. Ultimately, The Way We Argue Now promotes a revitalized culture of argument through a richer understanding of the ways critical reason is practiced at the individual, collective, and institutional levels. Bringing to the fore the complexities of academic debate while shifting the terms by which we assess the continued influence of theory, it will appeal to readers interested in political theory, literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and the place of academic culture in society and politics.


Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Author: Will Abberley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1108807542

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.


Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Author: Eva Ries

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 311076752X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flânerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flânerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.