Truth and propaganda in the Victorian social problem novel

1964 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-91
Author(s):  
Sheila M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Problem Novel

H. G. Wells

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-216
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Social Problem Novel ◽  
Symbolic World ◽  
Socialist Politics

This chapter shifts attention from reference in space to reference in time, in order to extend the argument about realism and metaphysics to a consideration of genres as ideological formations which must both engage with recognizable circumstances and possess an innate desire to defamiliarize, even contravene, the givens of the cultural symbolic world. The social problem novel highlights this paradox, because it can only imagine possible futures through extrapolation from present conditions. The future acts as another boundless context against which realist representation must be pivoted. Chapter 4 explores this temporal paradox in the novels of H. G. Wells, whose background in evolutionary biology and investment in performative socialist politics means he depicts contemporary society as already, in a sense, prescient. The conclusions drawn about the operation of temporality in Wells’s fiction—particularly his use of tenses and the odd, recurrent topos of metanarrative intrusion—are used to think through some of the implications for ‘condition of England’ writing as an oracular and dialectical tradition within realism.

The Interwar Social Problem Novel

1999 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Nella Larsen ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Agnes Smedley
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Problem Novel

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Andrew Mangham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Problem Novel ◽  
Social Novels ◽  
The Way

An outline of the way in which the nineteenth century invented the idea of hunger as a physiological and material phenomenon whose radical epistemological powers were constructed across literature, medicine, and physiology, this Introduction seeks to offer an outline of how the book’s reading of the social-problem novel will draw on the methodologies associated with literature and science, new materialism, and somatic (bodily) or anthropological realism. It also introduces how the social novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens promoted the development of knowledge and sympathy through both an emphasis on the material sufferings of the starving and a detailed analysis of what it means to go hungry, and to observe and to write about it in a way that seeks to be truthful.

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