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The Novel and the Problem of New Life
An expansive study of the novel's moral ambivalence toward procreation, from the nineteenth century through modernism to the present.
Satire in an Age of Realism
As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.
Satire in an Age of Realism
As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.
George Gissing and the Place of Realism
This collection explores Gissing’s place in the narrative of fin-de-siècle literature. Together, chapters here theorise how late-Victorian spatial and generic norms are confronted, explored and performed in Gissing’s works. In addition to presenting new readings of the major novels and introducing readers to lesser-known works, the collection advocates Gissing’s importance as a journalist, short story, and travel writer. It also recognises Gissing as a central proponent in the late-Victorian realism debate. The book, like today’s nineteenth-century studies, is interdisciplinary. It includes familiar interpretive approaches—biographical, historicist, and comparative—together with fresh perspectives informed by ecocriticism, materiality, and cultural performance. In addition, it is markedly comparative in scope. Gissing is read alongside familiar authors like Dickens, Ruskin, and Hardy, but also, and more unusually, Nietzsche, Besant, Freud and Foucault. Collectively, these chapters illustrate that Gissing, though attentive to contemporary issues, is neither uncomplicatedly realist nor are his writings uncomplicated historical records of place.
Flat Protagonists
We've all encountered protagonists who, over the course of a novel, turn out to be more complicated than we thought at first. But what does one do with a major character who simplifies as a novel progresses, to the point where even this novel's other characters begin to disregard him? Flat Protagonists shows that writers have undertaken such formal experiments-which give rise to its titular "flat protagonists"-since the novel's incipience. It finds such characters in British and French novels ranging from the late-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century by Aphra Behn, Isabelle de Charrière, Françoise de Graffigny, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust. Marta Figlerowicz argues that these unco...
Art of the Everyday
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its d...
Notework
Notework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures.
Maternal Abandonment and Queer Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Swedish Literature
This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.
Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism
This book is about the historical moment when writers and critics first used the term “realism” to describe representation in literature and painting. While scholarship on realism tends to proceed from an assumption that the term has a long-established meaning and history, this book reveals that mid-nineteenth-century critics and writers first used the term reluctantly, with much confusion over what it might actually mean. It did not acquire the ready meaning we now take for granted until the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, its first definitions came primarily by way of example and analogy, through descriptions of current practitioners, or through fictionalized representations of artists. By investigating original debates over the term “realism,” this book shows how writers simultaneously engaged with broader concerns about the changing meanings of what was real and who had the authority to decide this.
Investigating Death in Paradise
First televised in 2011, Death in Paradise remains one of the most popular shows in the U.K. The detective series is frequently ignored, panned or belittled by television critics, but viewers disagree. Bringing in more than eight million viewers a season, it is accessible in more than 235 global territories. This first book-length assessment of Death in Paradise offers a fresh take on the popular BBC drama. The book positions the show within broader contexts that illustrate its origins and timeless appeal, from the first conceptualizations of "paradise" in ancient cultures to the creation of the classic detective story in the 1920s. The detective inspectors on Death in Paradise come from a long line of fictional eccentrics who excel at finding quirky clues, seeing surprising connections and employing help from other officials and agencies. Through exploration of these narrative elements and more, the author reveals deeper themes of justice, inclusion and environmentalism.
