The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini

The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini
Author: H. Orel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 197
Release: 1995-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230371493

Sir Walter Scott defined the parameters of the historical novel and illustrated his concept of the genre by writing a long series of novels dealing with medieval times, the Elizabethan Age and the 18th Century. Later novels written by his contemporaries and successors attracted smaller audiences. When Robert Louis Stevenson, in the early 1880s, enthusiastically expanded the boundaries of romantic fiction, he became a standard-bearer and an inspiration to many of his fellow-novelists: Walter Besant, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley John Weyman, Anthony Hope, Henry Rider Haggard, and Rafael Sabatini.

Captain Blood

Captain Blood
Author: Rafael Sabatini
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0486112993

Physician and country gentleman Peter Blood is forced to turn from medicine to piracy in this swashbuckling classic brimming with stolen treasure, adventure on the high seas, and romance.

Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance

Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance
Author: K.S. Whetter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317004922

Unique in combining a comprehensive and comparative study of genre with a study of romance, this book constitutes a significant contribution to ongoing critical debates over the definition of romance and the genre and artistry of Malory's Morte Darthur. K.S. Whetter offers an original approach to these issues by prefacing a comprehensive study of romance with a wide-ranging and historically diverse study of genre and genre theory. In doing so Whetter addresses the questions of why and how romance might usefully be defined and how such an awareness of genre-and the expectations that come with such awareness-impact upon both our understanding of the texts themselves and of how they may have been received by their contemporary medieval audiences. As an integral part the study Whetter offers a detailed examination of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, a text usually considered a straightforward romance but which Whetter argues should be re-classified and reconsidered as a generic mixture best termed tragic-romance. This new classification is important in helping to explain a number of so-called inconsistencies or puzzles in Malory's text and further elucidates Malory's artistry. Whetter offers a powerful meditation upon genre, romance and the Morte which will be of interest to faculty, graduate students and undergraduates alike.

Conan Doyle

Conan Doyle
Author: Douglas Kerr
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199674949

Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice approaches Conan Doyle's writing in terms of themes such as sport, science, crime, and empire, finding within it a complex and surprising interpretation of a late-Victorian and early twentieth-century world, emerging into a troubling modernity.

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era
Author: Susan Walton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351156020

Beginning with the premise that women's perceptions of manliness are crucial to its construction, The author focuses on the life and writings of Charlotte Yonge as a prism for understanding the formulation of masculinities in the Victorian period. Yonge was a prolific writer whose bestselling fiction and extensive journalism enjoyed a wide readership. The author situates Yonge's work in the context of her family connections with the army, showing that an interlocking of worldly and spiritual warfare was fundamental to Yonge's outlook. For Yonge, all good Christians are soldiers, and Walton argues persuasively that the medievalised discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men that is often connected with late nineteenth-century Imperialism began earlier in the century, and that Yonge's work was one major strand that gave it substance. Of significance, Yonge also endorsed missionary work, which she viewed as an extension of a father's duties in the neighborhood and which was closely allied to a vigorous promotion of refashioned Tory paternalism. The author's study is rich in historical context, including Yonge's connections with the Tractarians, the effects of industrialization, and Britain's Imperial enterprises. Informed by extensive archival scholarship, Walton offers important insights into the contradictory messages about manhood current in the mid-nineteenth century through the works of a major but undervalued Victorian author.

The Guide to United States Popular Culture

The Guide to United States Popular Culture
Author: Ray Broadus Browne
Publisher: Popular Press
Total Pages: 1030
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780879728212

"To understand the history and spirit of America, one must know its wars, its laws, and its presidents. To really understand it, however, one must also know its cheeseburgers, its love songs, and its lawn ornaments. The long-awaited Guide to the United States Popular Culture provides a single-volume guide to the landscape of everyday life in the United States. Scholars, students, and researchers will find in it a valuable tool with which to fill in the gaps left by traditional history. All American readers will find in it, one entry at a time, the story of their lives."--Robert Thompson, President, Popular Culture Association. "At long last popular culture may indeed be given its due within the humanities with the publication of The Guide to United States Popular Culture. With its nearly 1600 entries, it promises to be the most comprehensive single-volume source of information about popular culture. The range of subjects and diversity of opinions represented will make this an almost indispensable resource for humanities and popular culture scholars and enthusiasts alike."--Timothy E. Scheurer, President, American Culture Association "The popular culture of the United States is as free-wheeling and complex as the society it animates. To understand it, one needs assistance. Now that explanatory road map is provided in this Guide which charts the movements and people involved and provides a light at the end of the rainbow of dreams and expectations."--Marshall W. Fishwick, Past President, Popular Culture Association Features of The Guide to United States Popular Culture: 1,010 pages 1,600 entries 500 contributors Alphabetic entries Entries range from general topics (golf, film) to specific individuals, items, and events Articles are supplemented by bibliographies and cross references Comprehensive index

Making History New

Making History New
Author: Seamus O'Malley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199364230

Making History New explores how several British modernists (Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West) applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of narrative history and historical novels.

The Marquis of Carabas

The Marquis of Carabas
Author: Raphael Sabatini
Publisher: House of Stratus
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2008-01-11
Genre:
ISBN: 0755115465

London is rife with impoverished French nobility who have escaped the horror of the French revolution. Quentin de Morlaix, sympathetic to these disenfranchised aristocrats, finds that he too has his own personal reasons to pray for an end to the Revolution. He sets off for France, and enters a life of confusion, mystery, and bloody execution.

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels
Author: Jennifer Camden
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317058488

Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of female characters who, while embodying the qualities associated with heroines, fail to achieve this status in the story. These "secondary heroines," often the friend or sister of the primary heroine, typically disappear from the action of the novel as the courtship plot progresses, only to return near the conclusion of the action with renewed demands on the reader's attention. Accounting for this persistent pattern, Camden suggests, reveals the cultural work performed by these unusual figures in the early history of the novel. Because she is often a far more vivid character than the heroine of the marriage plot, the secondary heroine inevitably engages the reader's interest in her plight. That the narrative apparently seeks to suppress her creates tension and points to the secondary heroine as a site of contested identity who represents an ideology of womanhood and nationhood at odds with the national ideals represented by the primary heroine, whom the reader is asked to embrace. In showing how the anxiety produced by these ideals is displaced onto the secondary heroine, Camden's study represents an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.

Film and Fiction

Film and Fiction
Author: T. A. Shippey
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 085991772X

Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval images, with particular reference to recent films. The middle ages provide the material for mass-market films, for historical and fantasy fiction, for political propaganda and claims of legitimacy, and these in their turn exert a force well outside academia. The phenomenon is tooimportant to be left unscrutinised: these essays show the continuing power and applicability of medieval images - and also, it must be said, their dangerousness and often their falsity. Of the ten essays in this volume, several examine modern movies, including the highly-successful A Knight's Tale (Chaucer as a PR agent) and the much-derided First Knight (the Round Table fights the Gulf War). Others deal with the appropriation of history and literature by a variety of interested parties: King Alfred press-ganged for the Royal Navy and the burghers of Winchester in 1901, William Langland discovered as a prophet of future Socialism, Chaucer at once venerated and tidied into New England respectability. Vikings, Normans and Saxons are claimed as forebears and disowned as losers in works as complex as Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga. Victorian melodramaprovides the clichés of "the bad baronet" who revives the droit de seigneur (but baronets are notoriously modern creations); and of the "bony grasping hand" of the Catholic Church and its canon lawyers (an image spread in ways eerily reminiscent of the modern "urban legend" in its Internet forms). Contributors: BRUCE BRASINGTON, WILLIAM CALIN, CARL HAMMER, JONA HAMMER, PAUL HARDWICK, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, GWENDOLYN MORGAN, JOANNE PARKER, CLARE A. SIMMONS, WILLIAM F. WOODS. Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.