How to Read a Victorian Novel - Brossura

Levine, George

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1405130563 ISBN 13: 9781405130561

Casa editrice: Blackwell Pub, 2007

Riassunto

How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction tothe genre. Using examples from the classics, like The PickwickPapers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, andMiddlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarityis. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victoriannovel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing, and formally carelessby emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures ofthe Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and toteach; to create serious "art" and to appeal to wide audiences; torespond both to the demands of publishing and also to their ownrich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity atfull speed.

Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literarytypes and explores the cultural and historical developments of thenovel form itself. The book also poses a series of "big questions"pertaining to money, capitalism, industry, race, gender, and, atthe same time, to formal issues, such as plotting, perspective, andrealist representation. In addition, it locates the qualities thatgive to the great variety of Victorian novels a "familyresemblance," the material conditions of their production, theirtendency to multiply plots, their obsession with class and money,their problematic handling of gender questions, and theircommitment to realist representation.

How to Read the Victorian Novel challenges our comfortableexpectations of the genre in order to explore intensively aburgeoning and changing literary form which mirrors a burgeoningand changing society.

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Recensione:

"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn′t actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010) Any student of Victorian fiction and culture will benefit from reading this refreshing reexamination of the major Victorian novels. Recommended. ( Choice Reviews, October 2008)

"A broad–ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." Times Higher Education Supplement

L'autore:

George Levine is the Kenneth Burke Professor of English at Rutgers University where he is also Director of the Center for the Analysis of Contemporary Culture. He is the author of Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (2002), The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001), Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (1991), and The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1983).

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Blackwell Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1405130563
• ISBN 13: 9781405130561
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 173