Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James

Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James
Author: Patricia McKee
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400854156

Patricia McKee demonstrates that Richardson, Eliot, and James see disorderliness and indeterminacy in the human self, human relations, and literature as primary sources of meaningfulness. The relationships these novels portray as most satisfying are unsettled and unsettling, interfering with rather than contributing to social stability. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Mother / Daughter Plot

The Mother / Daughter Plot
Author: Marianne Hirsch
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1989-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780253115751

Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa
Author: Gordon D. Fulton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780773518490

Gordon Fulton provides a fascinating new study of styles in Samuel Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, connecting the style the characters deploy in their speech and letters with their positions in society. Fulton argues that the novel is a critical examination of the relationship between language and power and an expression of Richardson's own understanding of social interaction as a struggle for personal pre-eminence and sexual dominance.

George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton

George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton
Author: Anna K. Nardo
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826263410

"In George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton's life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton's poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life - transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told."--BOOK JACKET.

Samuel Richardson, Comedic Narrative and the Culture of Domestic Violence

Samuel Richardson, Comedic Narrative and the Culture of Domestic Violence
Author: Christopher D. Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-04-26
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1527502465

This book provides a comprehensive reading of Samuel Richardson's novels. Using a combination of literary theory and criminology, Christopher D. Johnson demonstrates that Richardson not only understood the horrific dynamics of domestic violence, but also recognized the degree to which his first novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) could inadvertently normalize abusive relationships. This recognition informed Richardson's subsequent novels and fueled his distrust of novelistic fiction, especially those comedic works that depend on sudden transformations. It also caused him to draw careful delineations between the practical instruction he hoped to provide and the ideals of his Christian faith, particularly as they pertain to earthly suffering and self-sacrifice. The Richardson who emerges from the study becomes both a staunch defender of what he saw as a benevolent patriarchy and a fierce advocate for women's subjectivity, happiness and safety.

The Quest for Anonymity

The Quest for Anonymity
Author: Henry Alley
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780874136210

As Alley shows, no other subject in Eliot branches out so largely, so as to embrace all her artistic concerns, including her vision of her own biography and her need to adopt her pen name. Alley also demonstrates that for Eliot, the transcendent capacity to be unidentified creates a flexibility of mind that allows not only women but also men to shed confining personae and to be, in narrative form, both man and woman at the same time, an ability that imbues only the greatest of artists.

Passion and Virtue

Passion and Virtue
Author: David Blewett
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802035035

Richardson's novels reveal the conflict of human passion in all its aspects - love, lust, and suffering. This conflict is considered and critically analysed in fourteen essays, all originally published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Greatness Engendered

Greatness Engendered
Author: Alison Booth
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501722794

In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness.

Error and the Academic Self

Error and the Academic Self
Author: Seth Lerer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2003-03-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023150747X

How and why did the academic style of writing, with its emphasis on criticism and correctness, develop? Seth Lerer suggests that the answer lies in medieval and Renaissance philology and, more specifically, in mistakes. For Lerer, erring is not simply being wrong, but being errant, and this book illuminates the wanderings of exiles, émigrés, dissenters, and the socially estranged as they helped form the modern university disciplines of philology and rhetoric, literary criticism, and literary theory. Examining a diverse group that includes Thomas More, Stephen Greenblatt, George Hickes, Seamus Heaney, George Eliot, and Paul de Man, Error and the Academic Self argues that this critical abstraction from society and retreat into ivory towers allowed estranged individuals to gain both a sense of private worth and the public legitimacy of a professional identity.