“From the Bottom Up”: Chartist Fiction Revisits the Victorian Social Problem Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-457
Author(s):  
Carolyn Betensky
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones

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.


Author(s):  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Nella Larsen ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Agnes Smedley

Leonardo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
Tiago Franklin Rodrigues Lucena ◽  
Ana Paula Machado Velho ◽  
Vinicius Durval Dorne ◽  
Diana Maria Gallicchio Domingues

This paper describes a transdisciplinary approach that takes places in South of Brazil with the aim to contribute with an eco-bio-social problem: dengue fever. Inspired by enactive theories about relation between body x environment, the authors present here a nontraditional multifaceted bottom-up intervention, designed by civic-oriented journalists and artists to promote health and mobilize a small community in Maringá. The intention is to promote healthier behavior in a participatory perspective when citizens can produce and share their narratives. The content was used as creative material to produce multimedia news, sketch and prototype mobile apps with the support of community.


Author(s):  
Andrew Mangham

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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