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Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation
Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other’s creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars.
Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other’s novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, ...Read More
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Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens's American Engagements
In 1842, Victorian England’s foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first.
Using new materials—letters, diaries, and publishers’ records—Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens’s American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew ...Read More
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Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America
Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as “pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment.
Such “sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and ...Read More
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With Mortal Voice: The Creation of Paradise Lost
More often than not, critics have looked upon Milton's great epic not as a literary work but rather as a theological tract or a display of Renaissance learning. In this book John Shawcross seeks to redress that critical imbalance by examining the poem for its literary values. In doing so he reveals the scope and depth of Milton's poetic craftsmanship in his control of such elements as structure, myth, style, and language; and he offers new approaches to reading Paradise Lost as a literary masterpiece rather than a relic of religious history.
John T. Shawcross, professor of English at the ...Read More
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The Autonomous Image: Cinematic Narration and Humanism
Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a “living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains” in terms of man’s “new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essence is cinematic narration.” Prats’ work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors—Fellini’s Director’s Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller’s Seven Beauties, Antonioni’s Blowup—Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods ...Read More
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William Golding: Some Critical Considerations
In William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, fourteen scholars assess various aspects of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s writings. Their essays include criticism of individual works, discussion of major themes and technical considerations, and bibliographical studies. Separately, the essays help us understand the intricacies and impact of Golding’s art; together they show the breadth of his purpose.
Jack I. Biles was professor and assistant head of the Department of English, Georgia State University.
Robert O. Evans, author of Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations, was associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
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The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies
In this book, Walter Foreman studies the closing scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies, considering the tragic structure of the plays and the shapes the tragic characters give their lives by the way they encounter death.
Foreman sees in the variety of tragic endings of the plays evidence that Shakespeare consciously experimented with tragic forms, for when he repeated he also changed, and changed more than superficially. Further, Foreman believes that these varieties and extensions of dramatic form were fundamentally a way of experiencing a various, often mysterious world. Extending and exploring the possibilities of tragic form, the playwright created dramatic worlds ...Read More
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The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper
Focusing on style as a means of thematic expression, Donald A. Ringe in this study examines in detail the affinities that exist between the paintings of the Hudson River school and the works of William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. The emphasis on physical description of nature that characterizes the work of these writers, he finds, is not simply an imitation of European models, nor is it merely nonfunctional decoration. Rather, he demonstrates that the authors’ concern with description of the physical world derives from the late eighteenth-century theory of knowledge, and specifically from the concepts of ...Read More
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Mark Twain and the Community
Throughout his career Mark Twain viewed the relations between the individual and his community with mixed feelings, and this book explores both the ambiguities of Twain’s attitude and their effect upon his fiction. In the earlier novels—most notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—the protagonist enjoys a dual position—at liberty to follow his own inclinations while retaining his conventional place as a respected member of the community—and the resolutions of these works are built upon this duality. Facing realities which the earlier fiction evaded, Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court found himself in a dilemma ...Read More
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Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton's Poetry
Milton, the arch-Puritan and outspoken critic of the stereotyped rituals of the established churches, has been regarded by most scholars as a writer who is unlikely to have employed liturgical materials in his poetry. Thomas B. Stroup shows to the contrary that Milton made extensive use of Christian liturgy not only as material within the body of his poems but also as a force in shaping them.
In a survey of both Milton’s major works and his minor poems, prayers of thanksgiving, the General Confession, similarities to hymns, echoes from canticles, and many other rites and ceremonies of the church ...Read More
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