Elizabeth Gaskell: a literary life

2003 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 40-5654-40-5654
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Literary Life

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life (review)

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-428
Author(s):  
Carol A. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Life Review ◽  
Literary Life

The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Robert Madden ◽  
Marguerite Blessington
Keyword(s):  
Literary Life

Satire and Realism in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: an Interpretative Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Interpretative Analysis

Jane Austen is acknowledged for the application of realism and satire in her novels. This paper focuses on the analysis of realism and satire in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; however, her entire oeuvre spotlights the features (of satire and realism) alongside robust feminism: typical of her literary taste and temperament, not necessarily of the Romantic Age which she lived in. Rigorous analysis and realistic observation reveals that the employment of realism and satire in Pride and Prejudice, are quite obvious, in all sorts of aspects including narrative, settings, themes and characters. Analysis of the novel under study leads to the observation that satire and realism go hand in hand in the said novel—intermittently—and thoughtfully. Conclusively, it is observed that Jane Austen’s literary life had a tremendous influence on how to subsume realism (primarily through matrimonies) of age and satire on a romantic society (whereby ideals collapse headlong), in Pride and Prejudice.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Reading Old Books

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mack
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Urban Deprivation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
International Character

In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. The book argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It then analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, the book illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.

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