The Victorian Art of Fiction

The Victorian Art of Fiction
Author: Rohan Maitzen
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 155111769X

The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses where Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell
Author: Sandro Jung
Publisher: Academia Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9038216297

Assembles fourteen original essays on Gaskell, the Victorian novelist of social problem fiction

Serials to Graphic Novels

Serials to Graphic Novels
Author: Catherine J. Golden
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813063736

The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the realist artists of the "Sixties," this volume examines the entire lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant genre, arguing that it arose from and continually built on the creative vision of the caricature-style illustrators of the 1830s. She surveys the fluidity of illustration styles across serial installments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Serials to Graphic Novels examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Trilby. Golden explores factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book—the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies—and that ultimately created a mass market for illustrated fiction. Golden identifies present-day visual adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope as well as original Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Victorian-themed novels like Batman: Noël as the heirs to the Victorian illustrated book. With these adaptations and additions, the Victorian canon has been refashioned and repurposed visually for new generations of readers.

The Victorian Art of Fiction

The Victorian Art of Fiction
Author: Rohan Maitzen
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1770482644

The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses where Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”

The Victorian Illustrated Book

The Victorian Illustrated Book
Author: Richard Maxwell
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780813920979

US scholars of literature explore how illustrated books became a cultural form of great importance in England and Scotland from the 1830s and 1840s to the end of the century. Some of them consider particular authors or editions, but others look at general themes such as illustrations of time, maps and metaphors, literal illustration, and city scenes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel

Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel
Author: Jessica Durgan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429639597

As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s "The Yellow Face" (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). While color has been historically viewed as suspicious and seductive in Western culture, the Victorian period constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies and the upheavals of the first avant-garde art movements result in an increase in coloring’s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. These artist-authors draw on color’s traditional association with constructions of otherness to consider questions of identity and difference through the imaginative possibilities of color.

Women, Work, and Representation

Women, Work, and Representation
Author: Lynn Mae Alexander
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2003
Genre: Art and literature
ISBN: 0821414933

In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew, but this essentially domestic virtue took on a different aspect for the professional seamstress of the day. This study considers the way this powerful image of working-class suffering was used by social reformers in art and literature.

The Art of Fiction

The Art of Fiction
Author: David Lodge
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1448137799

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity
Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400840074

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, Simon Goldhill examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, Goldhill demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, Goldhill addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction--specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire--he discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature
Author: PH D Antonia Losano
Publisher:
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9780814257364

The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists. Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios--a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical--by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward--and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.