Still Life

Still Life

Author: Elisha Cohn

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0190250046

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Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel's fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts--by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy--Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of "still life": a decentered lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.


The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

Author: Deirdre David

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521646192

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In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, first published in 2000, a series of specially-commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.


Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Author: Matthew Sussman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-07

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1108832946

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Offers a deep history of style in theory and practice that transforms our understanding of style in the novel.


Beauty and Belief

Beauty and Belief

Author: Hilary Fraser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1986-01-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0521307678

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This study is an important contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England which examines the religio-aesthetic theories of some central writers of the time. Dr Fraser begins with a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of Tractarian theology and then proceeds to the orthodox certainties of Hopkins' theory of inscape, Ruskin's and Arnold's moralistic criticism of literature and the visual arts, and Pater's and Wilde's faith in a religion of art. The author identifies significant cultural and historical conditions which determined the interdependence of aesthetic and religious sensibility in the period. She argues that certain tensions in the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge - tensions between poetry and religion, rebellion and reaction, individualism and authority - continued to manifest themselves throughout the Victorian age, and as society became increasingly democratic, religion in turn became increasingly personal and secular.


Narrative Bonds

Narrative Bonds

Author: Alexandra Valint

Publisher:

Published: 2021-01-20

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780814214633

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While narrative fracturing, multiplicity, and experimentalism are commonly associated with modernist and postmodern texts, they have largely been understudied in Victorian literature. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel focuses on the centrality of these elements and address the proliferation of multiple narrators in Victorian novels. In Narrative Bonds, Alexandra Valint explores the ways in which the Victorian multi-narrator form moves toward the unity of vision across characters and provides inclusivity in an era of expanding democratic rights and a growing middle class. Integrating narrative theory, gothic theory, and disability studies with analyses of works by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, this comprehensive and illuminating study illustrates the significance and impact of the multi-narrator structure in Victorian novels.


The Victorian Illustrated Book

The Victorian Illustrated Book

Author: Richard Maxwell

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780813920979

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US scholars of literature explore how illustrated books became a cultural form of great importance in England and Scotland from the 1830s and 1840s to the end of the century. Some of them consider particular authors or editions, but others look at general themes such as illustrations of time, maps and metaphors, literal illustration, and city scenes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


The Outward Mind

The Outward Mind

Author: Benjamin Morgan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 022646220X

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Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.


Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907

Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907

Author: Giles Whiteley

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1474443745

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Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.


The Cult of Beauty

The Cult of Beauty

Author: Stephen Calloway

Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781851776948

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Surveys the aesthetic movement in Victorian England, showcasing artwork from the time period and describing its followers, the different art media used, phases, and eventual exploitation for commercial gain.