Dickens and the Bible

Dickens and the Bible
Author: Jennifer Gribble
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000289664

At a time when biblical authority was under challenge from the Higher Criticism and evolutionary science, ‘what providence meant’ was the most keenly contested of questions. This book takes up the controversial subject of Dickens and religion, and offers a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary area of religion and literature. In a close study of major novels, it argues that networks of biblical allusion reveal the Judeo-Christian grand narrative as key to his development as a writer, and as the ontological ground on which he stands to appeal to ‘the conscience of a Christian people’. Engaging the biblical narrative in dialogue with other contemporary narratives that concern themselves with origins, destinations, and hermeneutic decipherments, the inimitable Dickens affirms the Bible’s still-active role in popular culture. The providential thinking of two twentieth-century theorists, Bakhtin and Ricoeur, sheds light on an exploration of Dickens’s narrative theology.

A Companion to George Eliot

A Companion to George Eliot
Author: Amanda Anderson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2016-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119072476

This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot’s work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary criticism. It features innovative analysis ­exploring the relation between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era. A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholars Offers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot’s work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aesthetics Reflects the very latest developments in literary scholarship Traces the revealing links between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual ­concerns and those of today

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature
Author: Richard Fallon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108996167

When the term 'dinosaur' was coined in 1842, it referred to fragmentary British fossils. In subsequent decades, American discoveries—including Brontosaurus and Triceratops—proved that these so-called 'terrible lizards' were in fact hardly lizards at all. By the 1910s 'dinosaur' was a household word. Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature approaches the hitherto unexplored fiction and popular journalism that made this scientific term a meaningful one to huge transatlantic readerships. Unlike previous scholars, who have focused on displays in American museums, Richard Fallon argues that literature was critical in turning these extinct creatures into cultural icons. Popular authors skilfully related dinosaurs to wider concerns about empire, progress, and faith; some of the most prominent, like Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Neville Hutchinson, also disparaged elite scientists, undermining distinctions between scientific and imaginative writing. The rise of the dinosaurs thus accompanied fascinating transatlantic controversies about scientific authority.

Law, Equity and Romantic Writing

Law, Equity and Romantic Writing
Author: Michael Demson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1399500406

This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the 'age of revolutions' from 1750 to 1850 - a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of 'epistemic injustice' to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages
Author: Eavan O'Dochartaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108834337

Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
Author: Timothy Gao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108944892

Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform

A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform
Author: Ian Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350079316

The Age of Reform – the hundred years from 1820 to 1920 - has become synonymous with innovation and change but this period was also in many ways a deeply conservative and cautious one. With reform came reaction and revolution and this was as true of the law as it was of literature, art and technology. The age of Great Exhibitions and Great Reform Acts was also the age of newly systemized police forces, courts and prisons. A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform presents an overview of the period with a focus on human stories located in the crush between legal formality and social reform: the newly uniformed police, criminal mugshots, judge and jury, the shame of child labor, and the need for neighborliness in the crowded urban and increasingly industrial landscapes of Europe and the United States. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age
Author: Alistair Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316519856

An interdisciplinary study of the rich Victorian taxonomy of vagrancy, and the concepts of poverty, mobility and homelessness it expressed.