Shuttleworth Sally
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582563
- eISBN:
- 9780191702327
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582563.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines naturalist Edmund Gosse's memoir called Father and Son in relation to childhood study in England during the 19th century. This memoir offered a study of the development of moral ...
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This chapter examines naturalist Edmund Gosse's memoir called Father and Son in relation to childhood study in England during the 19th century. This memoir offered a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy and it was written directly within the framework established by all those conscientious recorders of child and infant development of the 1890s. It was influenced by the child study movement, which allowed Gosse to rewrite his family history and give prominence to the perceptions and responses of the Son.Less
This chapter examines naturalist Edmund Gosse's memoir called Father and Son in relation to childhood study in England during the 19th century. This memoir offered a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy and it was written directly within the framework established by all those conscientious recorders of child and infant development of the 1890s. It was influenced by the child study movement, which allowed Gosse to rewrite his family history and give prominence to the perceptions and responses of the Son.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic ...
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This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic category in the period, and gets displaced towards fiction. The chapter focuses on ‘Mark Rutherford’, not just for his autobiography, but for his later inclusion of the story ‘A Mysterious Portrait’. The concept of the heteronym is introduced, to be developed in Chapters 7 and Chapter 8. Other authors discussed here include George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), H. G. Wells (Boon), Henry Adams, Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh), and Edmund Gosse (Father and Son). The various displacements of auto/biography are shown to complicate Lejeune's concept of the autobiographic contract guaranteeing the identity of author, narrator, and subject.Less
This is the first of four chapters exploring the turn‐of‐the‐century disturbances in the relation between life‐writing and fiction. It argues that ‘autobiography’ begins to seem a problematic category in the period, and gets displaced towards fiction. The chapter focuses on ‘Mark Rutherford’, not just for his autobiography, but for his later inclusion of the story ‘A Mysterious Portrait’. The concept of the heteronym is introduced, to be developed in Chapters 7 and Chapter 8. Other authors discussed here include George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), H. G. Wells (Boon), Henry Adams, Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh), and Edmund Gosse (Father and Son). The various displacements of auto/biography are shown to complicate Lejeune's concept of the autobiographic contract guaranteeing the identity of author, narrator, and subject.
Mhairi Pooler
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381977
- eISBN:
- 9781786945242
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781781381977.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter focuses on Edmund Gosse, Victorian man of letters, and his autobiography Father and Son. The book’s differences from the other works discussed in Writing Life are notable, but the very ...
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This chapter focuses on Edmund Gosse, Victorian man of letters, and his autobiography Father and Son. The book’s differences from the other works discussed in Writing Life are notable, but the very differences make Gosse’s narrative significant, for his unusual genre mixing generates a number of themes and motifs that resonate through the study: generational difference and influence; inheritance; the role of reading in shaping authorial individuality (Bloom); and a concept of autobiography as ‘fathering’ (or ‘mothering’) the self. The chapter concludes that as Father and Son subverts traditional spiritual autobiography in favour of an artist’s apprenticeship narrative, so Gosse’s struggle against inheriting his father’s religious beliefs enables his eventual individuation. Gosse is often viewed as critic rather than an author, but this chapter shows that his autobiography reveals an extremely versatile writer whose opinion mattered – and this is the persona that Father and Son projects in place of the creative artist.Less
This chapter focuses on Edmund Gosse, Victorian man of letters, and his autobiography Father and Son. The book’s differences from the other works discussed in Writing Life are notable, but the very differences make Gosse’s narrative significant, for his unusual genre mixing generates a number of themes and motifs that resonate through the study: generational difference and influence; inheritance; the role of reading in shaping authorial individuality (Bloom); and a concept of autobiography as ‘fathering’ (or ‘mothering’) the self. The chapter concludes that as Father and Son subverts traditional spiritual autobiography in favour of an artist’s apprenticeship narrative, so Gosse’s struggle against inheriting his father’s religious beliefs enables his eventual individuation. Gosse is often viewed as critic rather than an author, but this chapter shows that his autobiography reveals an extremely versatile writer whose opinion mattered – and this is the persona that Father and Son projects in place of the creative artist.
Jeffrey Blustein
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195067996
- eISBN:
- 9780199852895
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195067996.003.0013
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This chapter discusses integrity in terms of the structure of principles and commitments to which the individual adheres and shows why integrity is not sufficient for the excellence of a human life. ...
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This chapter discusses integrity in terms of the structure of principles and commitments to which the individual adheres and shows why integrity is not sufficient for the excellence of a human life. It cites a moving study of Edmund Gosse's father, a respected marine zoologist known for his intellectual honesty and a man of severely fundamental religious principles, who lacks integrity or what John Kekes calls “wholeness.” It reports that the elder Gosse suffered an intellectual crisis: on the one side was evolutionary theory, and on the other was his Christian fundamentalism with its literal reading of the Genesis account of creation. Gosse the dedicated scientist and Gosse the fundamentalist Christian could not cohere with each other in a unified life of commitment. The intellectual crisis was precipitated by his awareness of incompatible commitments, but the incoherence is not always recognized as such by the agent.Less
This chapter discusses integrity in terms of the structure of principles and commitments to which the individual adheres and shows why integrity is not sufficient for the excellence of a human life. It cites a moving study of Edmund Gosse's father, a respected marine zoologist known for his intellectual honesty and a man of severely fundamental religious principles, who lacks integrity or what John Kekes calls “wholeness.” It reports that the elder Gosse suffered an intellectual crisis: on the one side was evolutionary theory, and on the other was his Christian fundamentalism with its literal reading of the Genesis account of creation. Gosse the dedicated scientist and Gosse the fundamentalist Christian could not cohere with each other in a unified life of commitment. The intellectual crisis was precipitated by his awareness of incompatible commitments, but the incoherence is not always recognized as such by the agent.
Mhairi Pooler
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381977
- eISBN:
- 9781786945242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781781381977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and ...
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Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.Less
Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.
