The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists

The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists
Author: Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: European fiction
ISBN: 9781443867566

This book provides an overview of the literary grotesque in 19th-century Europe, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens, whose use of this complex aesthetic category is thus addressed in relation with other 19th-century European writers. The crossing of geographical boundaries allows an in-depth study of the different modes of the grotesque found in 19th-century fiction. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the extensive use of such a favoured mode of expression. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are thus used here to shed new light on Dickensâ (TM)s influences (both given and received), as well as to compare and contrast his use of the grotesque with that of key 19th-century writers like Hugo, Gogol, Thackeray, Hardy and a few others. The essays of this volume examine the various forms taken by the grotesque in 19th-century European fiction, such as, for example, the fusion of the familiar and the uncanny, or of the terrifying and the comic; as well as the figures and narrative techniques best suited for the expression of a novelistâ (TM)s grotesque vision of the world. These essays contribute to an assessment of the links between the grotesque, the gothic and the fantastic, and, more generally, the genres and aesthetic categories which the 19th-century grotesque fed on, like caricature, the macabre and tragicomedy. They also examine the novelistsâ (TM) grotesque as contributing to the questioning of society in Victorian Britain and 19th-century Europe, echoing its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress. This study naturally adopts as its theoretical basis the works of key theorists and critics of the grotesque: namely, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin in the 19th century, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham and Elisheva Rosen in the 20th century.

The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists

The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists
Author: Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443874051

This book provides an overview of the literary grotesque in 19th-century Europe, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens, whose use of this complex aesthetic category is thus addressed in relation with other 19th-century European writers. The crossing of geographical boundaries allows an in-depth study of the different modes of the grotesque found in 19th-century fiction. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the extensive use of such a favoured mode of expression. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are thus used here to shed new light on Dickens’s influences (both given and received), as well as to compare and contrast his use of the grotesque with that of key 19th-century writers like Hugo, Gogol, Thackeray, Hardy and a few others. The essays of this volume examine the various forms taken by the grotesque in 19th-century European fiction, such as, for example, the fusion of the familiar and the uncanny, or of the terrifying and the comic; as well as the figures and narrative techniques best suited for the expression of a novelist’s grotesque vision of the world. These essays contribute to an assessment of the links between the grotesque, the gothic and the fantastic, and, more generally, the genres and aesthetic categories which the 19th-century grotesque fed on, like caricature, the macabre and tragicomedy. They also examine the novelists’ grotesque as contributing to the questioning of society in Victorian Britain and 19th-century Europe, echoing its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress. This study naturally adopts as its theoretical basis the works of key theorists and critics of the grotesque: namely, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin in the 19th century, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham and Elisheva Rosen in the 20th century.

Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Author: Elena V. Shabliy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2020-08-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793631425

Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.

Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts

Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts
Author: Claire Wood
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre:
ISBN: 1474441653

The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.

Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Author: Eva Ries
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311076752X

Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flânerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flânerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.

A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English

A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English
Author: Sherri L. Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442277483

The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.

Dickens and Victorian Psychology

Dickens and Victorian Psychology
Author: Tyson Stolte
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192674269

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments—from free indirect discourse to first-person narration—in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view—as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism—by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Author: Isabelle Hervouet
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785277545

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

The Flaneur in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

The Flaneur in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
Author: Isabel Vila-Cabanes
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527519392

The flaneur is a cultural and literary phenomenon usually associated with nineteenth–century Paris, but the type also exists in the artistic and literary panorama of other major European capitals, such as London, Berlin, and Moscow. Despite massive recent interest in the figure of the flaneur in scholarly studies, analyses about the nineteenth–century British analogue are often fragmentary, appearing in the form of isolated articles. However, there is an abundant amount of nineteenth–century novels, sketches and journalistic essays which offer remarkable and hitherto overlooked accounts of the British metropolis, and which frequently include the figure of the flaneur as a central character or the topic of flanerie as a theme. This book explores a great array of texts, making an essential contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the prehistory or, rather, history of the British flaneur from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, with a special focus on the nineteenth century. The flaneur is looked at as a figure in which the development and dynamics of the modern metropolis and its impact on the literary discourse are manifested from a formal, as well as thematic, perspective.

The Early Modern Grotesque

The Early Modern Grotesque
Author: Liam Semler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429684789

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.