Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (review)

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-446
Author(s):  
Christopher Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

ANNE BRONTË'S SHAMEFUL AGNES GREY

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hallemeier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agnes Grey ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

scholarly journals SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES

NAN Nü ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Political Turmoil

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

scholarly journals ’n Groene in De Nieuwe Gids, Frederik van Eeden, De kleine Johannes en die ekologisme

Literator ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
W. Van Zyl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Success ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

An ecologist in De Nieuwe Gids, Frederik van Eeden’s De kleine Johannes and ecologismThe famous late nineteenth-century Dutch literary rebels, the Tachtigers, chose a part of Frederik van Eeden's De kleine Johannes as the opening text for the first edition of their literary mouthpiece, De Nieuwe Gids. Closer analysis in this article shows, however, that the novel contradicts precisely those literary ideals it was supposed to embody. Much more than being an illustration of the Romantic poetics favoured by the movement, it tends to be a rather didactic defence of ecological ideals and a literary preview of ideas Van Eeden would later advocate much more outspokenly. In his so-called Walden Experiment, inspired by the views of the American ecologist Henry David Thoreau, he would even try to put these ideals into practice. This experiment did not bring about the social success Van Eeden hoped for, but in an ironical way it did fulfil a prophecy in De kleine Johannes: “Among people you will experience endless sorrow…”.

scholarly journals Madness in the Society: Analysis of ‘One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest’

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irine Maria Joy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Beat Generation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Culture

Sanity is what society projects it to be, and which isn't true always. Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stands against the institutionalised mental illness in hospitals. The novel can be analysed as a metaphor of nineteenth century America when asylums were a place where non-conformists of the society are sent to. Foucault's Madness and Civilization discusses these notions clearly along with the interconnected themes of power, insanity and rebellion. The patients in the asylum may seem insane, but the idea of insanity is often misinterpreted and misrepresented by the society Madness is connected to correction rather than sickness. Therefore, the techniques used to heal the illness are far more unethical. This paper is an observation of insanity or madness in the society. It also unravels the concept of ‘unreason’ by Foucault in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The social and historic reading of the whole text explores Anti-Conformism (Beat Generation) and Counter Culture Movement (Hippie-culture) in America i.e, Individual v/s Society.

Romancing the Interstitial

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-337
Author(s):  
Sheila Liming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

Sheila Liming, “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy” (pp. 311–337) This essay links Julia Ward Howe’s infamous “lost” text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac’s figure of the “tragic hermaphrodite” with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term “hermaphrodite” outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence’s hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term “hermaphrodite” was used and understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac’s Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological “truth.” Howe’s Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference.

Division of Purpose in George Gissing

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
Jacob Korg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Novels

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”

scholarly journals “Self-sacrifice may be Quite Wrong”: Women’s Education and Finances in The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Samiya Alam ◽  
Aimillia Ramli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Economy And Education ◽  
The Impact

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the surplus number of single women presented an internal crisis that accumulated in a number of debates on the subject in various fields, such as economy and education. While much have been written about these in relation to the social context of the time, little have been said specifically about the way single women and their educational and financial positions are presented in late-nineteenth-century English novels. This paper focusses on George Gissing’s (1857-1903) novel The Odd Women (1893) and its portrayal of single women and the parallel roles played by money and education in the women’s decision to remain unmarried. The method applied in this study is based on contextual as well as textual analyses and interpretation of the novel in light of feminist and Marxist literary theories. This study investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of single women towards the end of the nineteenth century. The result of this study shows the novel makes a correlation between women’s level of education and financial situation with their choice to remain single.

“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'S NO NAME

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Banking System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
The One

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

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