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This analysis of themes and conventions in the major Victorian novel pays particular attention to the novelist’s self-conscious use of art as moral and psychological inquiry. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, and George Eliot are just some of the authors who are discussed in depth.
What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion "feels right"? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? Good Form argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, Jesse Rosenthal shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre’s formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period’s least attractive and interesting qualities. But Good Form argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, Rosenthal shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. Good Form helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.
This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.
How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.
"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."
1What do the Victorian novel and the stock-market graph have in common? In The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph, ,,Audrey Jaffe explores the influence on modern subjectivity of an economic and emotional discourse constructed by both the Victorian novel and the stock market. The book shows how the novel and the market define character as fundamentally vicarious, and how the graphs, tickers, and pulses that represent the stock market function for us, as the novel did for the Victorians, as both representation and source of collective expectations and emotions. A rereading of key Victorian texts, this volume is also a rereading of the relation between Victorian and contemporary culture, describing the way contemporary accounts of such phenomena as frauds, bubbles, and the economics of happiness reproduce Victorian narratives and assumptions about character. Jaffe draws on the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and political theorists, popular discourse about the stock market, and novelistic representations of emotion and identity to offer new readings of George Eliot's Middlemarch, Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister, and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. Charting a new understanding of the relation between money, emotions, and identity, The Affective Life of the Average Man makes a significant contribution to Victorian studies, economic criticism, and the study of the history and representation of emotion.
In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.
'Reader, I murdered him.' JANE STEELE is a brilliant Gothic retelling of JANE EYRE from Edgar-nominated Lyndsay Faye, for fans of LONGBOURN and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES. 'I loved it' - Elly Griffiths. ** JANE STEELE HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR AN EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL 2017 ** Like the heroine of the novel she adores, Jane Steele suffers cruelly at the hands of her aunt and schoolmaster. And like Jane Eyre, they call her wicked - but in her case, she fears the accusation is true. When she flees, she leaves behind the corpses of her tormentors. A fugitive navigating London's underbelly, Jane rights wrongs on behalf of the have-nots whilst avoiding the noose. Until an advertisement catches her eye. Her aunt has died and the new master at Highgate House, Mr Thornfield, seeks a governess. Anxious to know if she is Highgate's true heir, Jane takes the position and is soon caught up in the household's strange spell. When she falls in love with the mysterious Charles Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him - body, soul and secrets - and what if he discovers her murderous past?
