Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. The Nineteenth Century Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 168. $99.95 (cloth).

2008 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-701
Author(s):  
Monica Flegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Romantic Friendship

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature (review)

symplokē ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 372-374
Author(s):  
Todd Starkweather
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Romantic Friendship

FORGETTING THACKERAY AND UNMAKING CAREERS

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-545
Author(s):  
Amanpal Garcha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Many

One of the peculiar challengesfacing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. TheMLA Bibliographycontains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature –Desire and Domestic Fiction(1987) andThe Novel and the Police(1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson'sThe Powers of Distance(2001), Sharon Marcus'sBetween Women, and Alex Woloch'sThe One vs the Many(2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether fromThe English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence(1970).

Graphing Jane Austen

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Carroll ◽  
John A. Johnson ◽  
Jonathan Gottschall ◽  
Daniel Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Dominance Behavior ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Web

Building on findings in evolutionary psychology, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels. Characters were rated on the web by 519 scholars and students of Victorian literature. Rated categories include motives, criteria for selecting marital partners, personality traits, and the emotional responses of readers. Respondents assigned characters to roles as protagonists, antagonists, or associates of protagonists or antagonists. We conclude that protagonists and their associates form communities of cooperative endeavor. Antagonists exemplify dominance behavior that threatens community cohesion. We summarize results from the whole body of novels and use them to identify distinctive features in the novels of Jane Austen.

Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: the Case of Samuel Bamford

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labour History

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

scholarly journals Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Maria Lujan Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Upheaval

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

scholarly journals HERO SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XIX CENTURY (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS BY J. S. LE FANU AND R. L. STEVENSON)

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
T. Kyrpyta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
English Society ◽  
Split Personality ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
Political Economic

In this article, we aim to examine how English writers of the second half of the nineteenth century attempted to answer the question of the identity of their representative, the way they saw human nature, and the nature of good and evil in a person, in what they saw the integrity of personality, from which the ideals were repelled in search of a hero of his time. Using cultural, historical, and comparative methods, we contrasted the momentous events that influenced nineteenth-century English society with such a literary phenomenon as the revival of interest in the techniques characteristic of the Gothic novel, in particular, characters' doubles, the split personality, expressed through physicality. We have considered the reasons why the idea of the dualism of human nature became relevant in this era. The political, economic and social shifts in the life of England in the second half of the nineteenth century caused the writers to rethink their own identities as representative of nation and humanity. Scientific discoveries, above all, the work of Darwin, forced a new look at the nature of man, his inner world. As a projection of Darwinism as well as the search for self-determination of the colonized peoples, there is a fear of degradation, which is reflected in the appearance of animal characters (the monkey-like ghost in Le Fanu's novel Green Tea, Hyde in the novel by R. L. Stevenson "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"). The literary hero of the late nineteenth century is a multifaceted combination of archetypal images such as Prometheus, Satan, Pygmalion, and the embodiment of the idea of the dualism of human soul, in which the divine and animal principles are combined. Such a split personality is also associated with the destruction of the image of the good patriarch as the embodiment of the English nation. Keywords: Victorian literature, double, duality, rebel hero, identity, Prometheus myth, English "Gothic" tradition.

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