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Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference constructed the middle-class self and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling paved the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics."--BOOK JACKET.
No detailed description available for "Scenes of Sympathy".
1What do the Victorian novel and the stock-market graph have in common? In The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph, ,,Audrey Jaffe explores the influence on modern subjectivity of an economic and emotional discourse constructed by both the Victorian novel and the stock market. The book shows how the novel and the market define character as fundamentally vicarious, and how the graphs, tickers, and pulses that represent the stock market function for us, as the novel did for the Victorians, as both representation and source of collective expectations and emotions. A rereading of key Victorian texts, this volume is also a rereading of the relation be...
"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-s...
In the last few decades Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. The essays in this Companion draw on recent advances in biographical and bibliographical studies of Gaskell and cover the range of her impressive and varied output as a writer of novels, biography, short stories, and letters. The volume, which features well-known scholars in the field of Gaskell studies, focuses throughout on her narrative versatility and her literary responses to the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations of her time. This Companion will be invaluable for students and scholars of Victorian literature, and includes a chronology and guide to further reading.
"A brilliantly original consideration of the interrelationship between narratorial omniscience, objectivity, and detachment, and characterological knowledge, subjectivity, and sympathy. . . . Jaffe provides an important new way of thinking about point of view in Dickens, and in fiction more generally."--Robert L. Patten, author of "Charles Dickens and His Publishers" "Jaffe has opened up new critical terrain, both in Dickens studies and in narrative theory. In recognizing the self-conscious complexity of the omniscience problematic in Dickens's novels, she makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the construction of Victorian subjectivity."--John Kucich, author of "Repression in Victorian Fiction"
Introduction : the biopolitical imagination -- Populating solitude : Malthus, the masses, and the romantic subject -- Political animals : the Victorian city, demography, and the politics of creaturely life -- Dickens's supernumeraries -- The sensation novel and the redundant woman questions -- "Because we are too menny
Victorian Investments explores the relationship between the financial system in Great Britain and other aspects of Victorian society and culture. Building on the special journal issue of Victorian Studies devoted to Victorian investments, this volume is the first to define an interdisciplinary field of study emerging in the space between Marxist critiques of capitalism and traditional histories of business and economics. The contributors demonstrate how phenomena such as the expansion of colonial and foreign markets, the broadening of the investor base through the advent of limited liability, and the rise of financial journalism gave rise to a "culture of investment" that affected Victorian Britons at every level of society and influenced every kind of cultural production. Drawing together work by prominent historians as well as literary and cultural critics, Victorian Investments both defines the methodologies and perspectives that characterize an existing body of scholarship and pushes that scholarship in new directions, demonstrating the signal role of economic developments in Victorian culture and society.
The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real presents a new interpretation of the Victorian realist novel based on realism's desire for the real. In provocative readings of novels by Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, and Collins, Jaffe redefines realist conventions and reinterprets long-held theories about realist representation.
While Darwinian and Freudian theories of vision and sexuality have represented women as lacking visual agency, Daryl Ogden's The Language of the Eyes argues that "the gaze" is not merely a masculine phenomenon, and that women have powerfully desiring eyes as well. Ogden offers a comprehensive cultural history of female visuality in England by analyzing scientific writings, conduct books, illustrated periodicals, poetry, painting, and novels, and he makes important and hitherto unrecognized connections between literary history, cultural studies, and science studies. In so doing, Ogden accomplishes what numerous feminist critics—especially film theorists—have not: the recovery of the modern female spectator from historical obscurity.