The Victorian Social-Problem Novel

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel PDF

Author: Josephine M. Guy

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 1996-09-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0333628446

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This book describes various accounts of the Victorian social-problem novel, examining their strengths and limitations in the light of the historiographical assumptions which underlie them. An alternative historical account is offered, which focuses on the novels' intellectual milieu - specifically on mid-Victorian concepts of 'the social' and of what was understood by the term 'social problem'. In detailed readings of individual works, the book argues that an appreciation of these concepts permits new ways of understanding the contradictions identified in these works together with their apparently 'conservative' politics.

Feeling for the Poor

Feeling for the Poor PDF

Author: Carolyn Betensky

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813930619

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What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.

The Social Life of Fluids

The Social Life of Fluids PDF

Author: Jules David Law

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 080146238X

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British Victorians were obsessed with fluids—with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel. Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids—blood, breast milk, and water—in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.

The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction

The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction PDF

Author: Rosemarie Bodenheimer

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1501733443

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The most telling expression of the politics of a novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer asserts, lies not in its proclaimed social intent, its continuity with nonfictional discourse, or its truth to class experience, but in the models of social movement and transformation traced out in the thread of its narrative. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction explores the story patterns and other narrative conventions through which the industrial or social-problem novel gives fictional shape to questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, and troubling in the Victorian age. Bodenheimer considers novels explicitly linked with the condition of England debates that preoccupied public-minded Victorians, narratives that confront such topics as the factory system, industrial and rural poverty, working-class politics, and the plight of women. Grouping well-known novels with less frequently read works according to shared narrative patterns, Bodenheimer delineates lines of influence, argument, and development within the subgenre of social fiction. Among the works she discusses are Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, two novels by Frances Trollope, Geraldine Jewsbury's Marian Withers, George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF

Author: Francis O'Gorman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0470779853

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This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Problem Novels

Problem Novels PDF

Author: Anna Maria Jones

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0814210538

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"In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating "invisibly" in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader's engagement with the text." "In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines "problem novels" - that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally embedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists' attachments to critical "detective work" closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers."--BOOK JACKET.

Populating the Novel

Populating the Novel PDF

Author: Emily Steinlight

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1501710710

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From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF

Author: Leah Price

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-04-09

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1400842182

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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel PDF

Author: Josephine M. Guy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1996-09-18

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1349249041

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This book describes various accounts of the Victorian social-problem novel, examining their strengths and limitations in the light of the historiographical assumptions which underlie them. An alternative historical account is offered, which focuses on the novels' intellectual milieu - specifically on mid-Victorian concepts of 'the social' and of what was understood by the term 'social problem'. In detailed readings of individual works, the book argues that an appreciation of these concepts permits new ways of understanding the contradictions identified in these works together with their apparently 'conservative' politics.

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