Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel

Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel
Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 1992-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521395356

Modern Romance examines the relationship between the revival of romance form and the ascendancy of the novel in British literary culture, from 1760 to 1850. The revival of romance as the literary embodiment of a national cultural identity provided a metaphor for the 'authenticity' of the novel itself, set against the changing formations of modern life. The material conditions, cultural status and formal repertoire of prose fiction were given a canonical transformation, leading to the form's nineteenth-century heyday, in Scott's Waverley novels. Ian Duncan's illuminating and innovative study begins with the first identification of modern prose fiction with romance form in the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel, and moves through Scott's highly influential dialectical blend of romance and history, to his relations with his successor in the role of national author, Charles Dickens.

Romancing the Novel

Romancing the Novel
Author: Margaret Bruzelius
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838756447

Romancing the Novel examines the ways in which romance forms characteristic of boys' books - as exemplified in the novels of Scott, Dumas, Verne, and Stevenson - influence narratives not generally put in the same category - both psychoanalytical accounts of the psyche and novels by authors as diverse as George Eliot, Ursual Le Guin, Joseph Conrad, and W. G. Sebald. Adventure has been most recently studied largely as a symptom of imperialism's ideological apparatus. But as an intensely familiar story available from the earliest reading, adventure conditions the narratable - its influence is felt from the nursery bed to the analyst's couch. By reading Maurice Sendak with Melanie Klein and Peter Rabbit with Daniel Deronda, Romancing the Novel argues that the power and depth of the generic constraints of the adventure form have not been recognized simply because they are so ubiquitous. Adventure fiction is not merely summer reading whose ephemeral effects dissipate, but rather a pervasive code that exerts powerful effects on the imaginable.

The Lives of the Novel

The Lives of the Novel
Author: Thomas G. Pavel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691165785

Reprint. Originally published: Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, A 2013.

Recognizing the Romantic Novel

Recognizing the Romantic Novel
Author: Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1846315026

The field of literature changed dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century, as under the shadow of Romanticism the novel became the most important literary genre of its day. Often neglected, the novels of the Romantic era puzzle critics yet are much more concerned with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncanny than their immediate predecessors or successors, and their authors include some of the most important novelists of British literary history—Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott among them. Featuring contributions from distinguished scholars in the field, Recognizing the Romantic Novel evaluates the vibrancy and centrality of the Romantic novel, showcasing the important new voices and directions in the field and showing it can hold its own in the canon of literary scholarship. “These essays offer us a lens through which we may recognize the Romantic novel as it has never been recognized before.”—Times Literary Supplement

Timely Voices

Timely Voices
Author: Goran Stanivukovic
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773552588

From the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to In Parenthesis – an epic poem written in 1937 by painter and poet David Jones – English writers have looked to romance as a resource and a strategy to expand the imaginary reach of their writing. Rethinking the resilience, purpose, and place of romance in English literature, Timely Voices discusses moments that have altered how we read and interpret this ever-changing form. Addressing the various ways in which romance has absorbed and been absorbed by drama, prose, and poetry, contributors to this volume demonstrate that romance texts do not produce something defined or confined by a static genre, but rather express a repository of creative possibilities. Covering writers including the anonymous author of Sir Orfeo, Jane Austen, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lucy Hutchinson, William Morris, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser, essays explore the magic and wonder of romance, Irish and Gaelic lore, how woodcuts in early books complement and extend printed text, how romance was dramatized, how it gives language to feminist politics and ideology, and how it becomes a counterpoint to finance in the fiction of the early Romantic period. A nuanced reinterpretation of romance in its own terms, Timely Voices inspires new appreciation of this form as a solution to textual, aesthetic, structural, ideological, and political problems in literature.

Encyclopedia of the Novel

Encyclopedia of the Novel
Author: Paul Schellinger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2557
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135918333

The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

Modernism and Colonialism

Modernism and Colonialism
Author: Richard Begam
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2007-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822390310

This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized. Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire. Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry

Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels

Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels
Author: Richard J. Hill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317081048

Innovative and accessibly written, Picturing Scotland examines the genesis and production of the first author-approved illustrations for Sir Walter' Scott's Waverley novels in Scotland. Consulting numerous neglected primary sources, Richard J. Hill demonstrates that Scott, usually seen as disinterested in the mechanics of publishing, actually was at the forefront of one of the most innovative publishing and printing trends, the illustrated novel. Hill examines the historical precedents, influences, and innovations behind the creation of the illustrated editions, tracking Scott's personal interaction with the mechanics of the printing and illustration process, as well as Scott's opinions on visual representations of literary scenes. Of particular interest is Scott's relationships with William Allan and Alexander Nasmyth, two important early nineteenth-century Scottish artists. As the first illustrators of the Waverley novels, their work provided a template for one of the more lucrative publishing phenomena. Informed by meticulous close readings of Scott's novels and augmented by a bibliographic catalogue of illustrations, Picturing Scotland is an important contribution to Scott studies, the development of the illustrated novel, and publishing history.

A Companion to the English Novel

A Companion to the English Novel
Author: Stephen Arata
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119068274

This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day. Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research

The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period

The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period
Author: Joe Bray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317019784

Beginning with the premise that the portrait was undergoing a shift in both form and function during the Romantic age, Joe Bray examines how these changes are reflected in the fiction of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton and Amelia Opie. Bray considers portraiture in a broad sense as encompassing caricature and the miniature, as well as the classic portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others. He argues that the portrait in fiction often functions not as a transparent index to character or as a means of producing a straightforward likeness, but rather as a cue for misreading and a sign of the slipperiness and subjectivity of interpretation. The book is concerned with more than simply the appearance of portraits in Romantic fiction, however. More broadly, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period investigates how the language of portraiture pervades the novel in this period and how the two art forms exert mutual stylistic influence on each other.