Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199283514
- eISBN:
- 9780191712715
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283514.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been ...
More
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.Less
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the ...
More
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.Less
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.
Amy M. King
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161519
- eISBN:
- 9780199787838
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's ...
More
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.Less
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.
Jane Wood
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187608
- eISBN:
- 9780191674723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187608.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This ...
More
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.Less
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development ...
More
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.Less
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The 1882 ordination of Abby's son Christopher Rhodes Eliot (1856‐1945) in the Boston suburb of Dorchester brings the story back to the east, and eight years later, his marriage to Mary Jackson May ...
More
The 1882 ordination of Abby's son Christopher Rhodes Eliot (1856‐1945) in the Boston suburb of Dorchester brings the story back to the east, and eight years later, his marriage to Mary Jackson May (1859‐1926) introduces a radical spirit into the line of Eliot women. Descended from staunch abolitionist preachers and independent females the likes of Abby May and Louisa May Alcott, Mary takes charge as the dominant spouse and is instrumental in Christopher's moving the family to Beacon Hill and taking charge of Bulfinch Place Church in Boston's squalid West End. Summers at Camp Maple Hill on Lake Memphremagog in Quebec reinforce the female hegemony that emboldens the next wave of parsonage females. Martha May Eliot (1891‐1978) and Abby Adams Eliot (1892‐1992) will script larger lives without abandoning their inherited values.Less
The 1882 ordination of Abby's son Christopher Rhodes Eliot (1856‐1945) in the Boston suburb of Dorchester brings the story back to the east, and eight years later, his marriage to Mary Jackson May (1859‐1926) introduces a radical spirit into the line of Eliot women. Descended from staunch abolitionist preachers and independent females the likes of Abby May and Louisa May Alcott, Mary takes charge as the dominant spouse and is instrumental in Christopher's moving the family to Beacon Hill and taking charge of Bulfinch Place Church in Boston's squalid West End. Summers at Camp Maple Hill on Lake Memphremagog in Quebec reinforce the female hegemony that emboldens the next wave of parsonage females. Martha May Eliot (1891‐1978) and Abby Adams Eliot (1892‐1992) will script larger lives without abandoning their inherited values.
Peter McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a ...
More
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.Less
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
Joseph V. Femia
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198280637
- eISBN:
- 9780191599231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198280637.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are ...
More
According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are many and various, ranging from proto‐fascists (Nietzsche, Maurras) and conservatives (T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset) through to progressive liberals (J.S. Mill) and laissez‐faire liberals (Hayek). It is concluded that they were unduly alarmist and underestimated democracy's ability to adapt to other values.Less
According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are many and various, ranging from proto‐fascists (Nietzsche, Maurras) and conservatives (T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset) through to progressive liberals (J.S. Mill) and laissez‐faire liberals (Hayek). It is concluded that they were unduly alarmist and underestimated democracy's ability to adapt to other values.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
With the marriage of Abby's oldest son Thomas Lamb Eliot (1841–1936) and Henrietta Robins Mack (1845‐1940), the scene shifts to Portland, OR, where the new pastor virtually replicates his father's ...
More
With the marriage of Abby's oldest son Thomas Lamb Eliot (1841–1936) and Henrietta Robins Mack (1845‐1940), the scene shifts to Portland, OR, where the new pastor virtually replicates his father's career in St. Louis. Tom also tries to enforce the words on the Eliot coast of arms: Tace Et Face (“Keep Silent and Work”) but Etta, full‐throated and resolute, is indomitable. Constrained from confiding in lady friends and unable to get the ear of her spouse, she is prone to depression and loneliness and begins covertly to write for herself and for readers of ladies' magazines. Her first success as a published author, a resounding polemical essay, is picked up by several religious papers, but Tom objects, and again, she goes under cover in using her talent. Etta helps write her husband's sermons, and she speaks before embryo congregations without presuming to characterize it as preaching.Less
With the marriage of Abby's oldest son Thomas Lamb Eliot (1841–1936) and Henrietta Robins Mack (1845‐1940), the scene shifts to Portland, OR, where the new pastor virtually replicates his father's career in St. Louis. Tom also tries to enforce the words on the Eliot coast of arms: Tace Et Face (“Keep Silent and Work”) but Etta, full‐throated and resolute, is indomitable. Constrained from confiding in lady friends and unable to get the ear of her spouse, she is prone to depression and loneliness and begins covertly to write for herself and for readers of ladies' magazines. Her first success as a published author, a resounding polemical essay, is picked up by several religious papers, but Tom objects, and again, she goes under cover in using her talent. Etta helps write her husband's sermons, and she speaks before embryo congregations without presuming to characterize it as preaching.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In a tribe of resilient females whose compromises prevent their defeat, Etta's daughter‐in‐law Minna Sessinghaus Eliot (1868‐1944) is a tragic exception. A summa cum laude from Washington University, ...
More
In a tribe of resilient females whose compromises prevent their defeat, Etta's daughter‐in‐law Minna Sessinghaus Eliot (1868‐1944) is a tragic exception. A summa cum laude from Washington University, she abandons her dream of being a scholar to marry William G. Eliot, Jr. (1866‐1956). By 1906, when Will is installed as pastor in Portland, OR, Minna is losing the battle to squeeze herself into a life that has cramped her intellect. As laywomen turn from church work to more rewarding alternatives, leaving the minister's wife to pick up the slack and to envy their freedom to leave, Minna's symptoms of neurasthenia progress until she becomes an invalid. Will's duties expand correspondingly. He takes on the added roles of house‐husband, nurse, and primary parent for grandson Billy, whose young mother Ruth has left a bad marriage, obtained+ a divorce, and gone back to school.Less
In a tribe of resilient females whose compromises prevent their defeat, Etta's daughter‐in‐law Minna Sessinghaus Eliot (1868‐1944) is a tragic exception. A summa cum laude from Washington University, she abandons her dream of being a scholar to marry William G. Eliot, Jr. (1866‐1956). By 1906, when Will is installed as pastor in Portland, OR, Minna is losing the battle to squeeze herself into a life that has cramped her intellect. As laywomen turn from church work to more rewarding alternatives, leaving the minister's wife to pick up the slack and to envy their freedom to leave, Minna's symptoms of neurasthenia progress until she becomes an invalid. Will's duties expand correspondingly. He takes on the added roles of house‐husband, nurse, and primary parent for grandson Billy, whose young mother Ruth has left a bad marriage, obtained+ a divorce, and gone back to school.
Gregory Tate
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199659418
- eISBN:
- 9780191749018
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199659418.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines Victorian poetry's preoccupation with studying the mind. It argues that Victorian poets, inheriting from their Romantic forerunners the belief that subjective thoughts and feelings ...
More
This book examines Victorian poetry's preoccupation with studying the mind. It argues that Victorian poets, inheriting from their Romantic forerunners the belief that subjective thoughts and feelings were the most important materials for poetry, used their writing both to give expression to mental processes and to scrutinize and analyse those processes, and it considers why and how psychological analysis became an increasingly important element of poetic theory and practice in the mid-nineteenth century. This development coincided with the rise of the scientific discipline of psychology and with the growing recognition that the workings of the mind could be studied using the analytical methods of science. The writings of Victorian poets often employed similar methods, but, at the same time, the language and tone of their psychological verse, and especially their ambivalent use of terms such as ‘brain’, ‘mind’, and ‘soul’, voiced an unresolved tension, felt throughout Victorian culture, between materialist, physiological theories of psychology and metaphysical or religious accounts of selfhood. This book considers the poetry of Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, and George Eliot, offering detailed readings of several major Victorian poems (including Amours de Voyage, In Memoriam, Maud, and The Ring and the Book) and presenting new evidence of their authors' interest in contemporary psychological theory. Ranging across lyric verse, epic poetry, and the dramatic monologue, the book explores the ways in which poetry simultaneously drew on, resisted, and contributed to the spread of scientific theories of mind in Victorian Britain.Less
This book examines Victorian poetry's preoccupation with studying the mind. It argues that Victorian poets, inheriting from their Romantic forerunners the belief that subjective thoughts and feelings were the most important materials for poetry, used their writing both to give expression to mental processes and to scrutinize and analyse those processes, and it considers why and how psychological analysis became an increasingly important element of poetic theory and practice in the mid-nineteenth century. This development coincided with the rise of the scientific discipline of psychology and with the growing recognition that the workings of the mind could be studied using the analytical methods of science. The writings of Victorian poets often employed similar methods, but, at the same time, the language and tone of their psychological verse, and especially their ambivalent use of terms such as ‘brain’, ‘mind’, and ‘soul’, voiced an unresolved tension, felt throughout Victorian culture, between materialist, physiological theories of psychology and metaphysical or religious accounts of selfhood. This book considers the poetry of Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, and George Eliot, offering detailed readings of several major Victorian poems (including Amours de Voyage, In Memoriam, Maud, and The Ring and the Book) and presenting new evidence of their authors' interest in contemporary psychological theory. Ranging across lyric verse, epic poetry, and the dramatic monologue, the book explores the ways in which poetry simultaneously drew on, resisted, and contributed to the spread of scientific theories of mind in Victorian Britain.
Edwin L. Battistella
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195367126
- eISBN:
- 9780199867356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367126.003.0013
- Subject:
- Linguistics, English Language
Chapter 13 examines the ways that American attitudes toward language, rhetoric and composition were evolving during Cody's time.
Chapter 13 examines the ways that American attitudes toward language, rhetoric and composition were evolving during Cody's time.
Alicia Mireles Christoff
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691193106
- eISBN:
- 9780691194202
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691193106.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid ...
More
This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.Less
This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.
David‐Antoine Williams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199583546
- eISBN:
- 9780191595295
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583546.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and ...
More
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and succoured, though perhaps not secured. Hill's cogitations on this problem accompany a career‐long exploration of the question of intrinsic value, a concept which he admits has gone out of fashion but which he nonetheless attempts to rescue for his theory of language. Hill's ethics of responsibility requires that literature memorialize and memorize the dead, but his scepticism about the ability of language to do justice to its subjects forces him into a paradoxical contemplation of silence as the only responsible speech. Even so, the question of value has increasingly been posed by Hill in its public dimension, as embodying the union of civic (including political), theological (including metaphysical), and grammatical (including etymological) thought. One way Hill thinks the writer can realize intrinsic value is in the assiduous plying of words, the working in poetry of their etymology, grammar, and syntax into a high semantic pitch; this chapter pays special attention to the words that have meant the most to Hill: ‘value’, ‘atonement’, ‘endurance’, ‘patience’, ‘attention’, ‘justice’, ‘grace’, ‘pitch’, ‘common’, and ‘alienation’.Less
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and succoured, though perhaps not secured. Hill's cogitations on this problem accompany a career‐long exploration of the question of intrinsic value, a concept which he admits has gone out of fashion but which he nonetheless attempts to rescue for his theory of language. Hill's ethics of responsibility requires that literature memorialize and memorize the dead, but his scepticism about the ability of language to do justice to its subjects forces him into a paradoxical contemplation of silence as the only responsible speech. Even so, the question of value has increasingly been posed by Hill in its public dimension, as embodying the union of civic (including political), theological (including metaphysical), and grammatical (including etymological) thought. One way Hill thinks the writer can realize intrinsic value is in the assiduous plying of words, the working in poetry of their etymology, grammar, and syntax into a high semantic pitch; this chapter pays special attention to the words that have meant the most to Hill: ‘value’, ‘atonement’, ‘endurance’, ‘patience’, ‘attention’, ‘justice’, ‘grace’, ‘pitch’, ‘common’, and ‘alienation’.
Daniel Hack
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196930
- eISBN:
- 9781400883745
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196930.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the ...
More
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.Less
Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition. In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, the book changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.
Cynthia Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This biography follows three generations of ministers' mothers, daughters, and wives as their family—one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties—spreads out across the continent and their liberal ...
More
This biography follows three generations of ministers' mothers, daughters, and wives as their family—one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties—spreads out across the continent and their liberal denomination evolves. The oldest Eliot women remember its quickening in the early 1800s, and the youngest, its formal consolidation in 1961 with the kindred Universalist Church of America. Shifting the focus from pulpits to parsonages, and from sermons to doubting pews, Tucker lifts up a long‐ignored female perspective and humanizes a famously staid and cerebral religious tradition. The narrative organizes itself as a series of stories, all shaped by defining experiences that are interrelated and timeless. These range from the deaths of young children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life, loneliness, doubt, and financial distress. One woman survives with the help of a rare female confidant in the parish. Another is braced by the unmet friends who read magazines that publish her poems. A third escapes from an ill‐fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one wasting condition for another. It is left to the matriarch's granddaughters to script larger lives for themselves by bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same‐sex unions and major careers in public health and preschool education. Thematically, these stories are linked by the women's continuing battles to make themselves heard through the din of clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality.Less
This biography follows three generations of ministers' mothers, daughters, and wives as their family—one of America's foremost Unitarian dynasties—spreads out across the continent and their liberal denomination evolves. The oldest Eliot women remember its quickening in the early 1800s, and the youngest, its formal consolidation in 1961 with the kindred Universalist Church of America. Shifting the focus from pulpits to parsonages, and from sermons to doubting pews, Tucker lifts up a long‐ignored female perspective and humanizes a famously staid and cerebral religious tradition. The narrative organizes itself as a series of stories, all shaped by defining experiences that are interrelated and timeless. These range from the deaths of young children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life, loneliness, doubt, and financial distress. One woman survives with the help of a rare female confidant in the parish. Another is braced by the unmet friends who read magazines that publish her poems. A third escapes from an ill‐fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one wasting condition for another. It is left to the matriarch's granddaughters to script larger lives for themselves by bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same‐sex unions and major careers in public health and preschool education. Thematically, these stories are linked by the women's continuing battles to make themselves heard through the din of clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality.
David Russell
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196923
- eISBN:
- 9781400887903
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more ...
More
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. This book traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. It argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. The book shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. The book demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, the book concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.Less
The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. This book traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. It argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. The book shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. The book demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, the book concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
After earning a B.A. at Radcliffe and spending five disillusioning years working with social relief agencies, Abby Adams Eliot is asked by the Women's Education Association of Boston to start a ...
More
After earning a B.A. at Radcliffe and spending five disillusioning years working with social relief agencies, Abby Adams Eliot is asked by the Women's Education Association of Boston to start a nursery school in the city. They send her to London to study the concept at Rachel McMillan's training center. Upon her return, she opens the Ruggles Street Nursery and Training School and remains its director for thirty years. Abby finds her life partner in Anna Evelyth Holman, who in 1919, goes to war‐torn France with the Radcliffe Unit to help the Red Cross. Back home, Anna teaches science at the Winsor School in Boston, while Abby carries her expertise to Unitarian Sunday School programs and helps Sophia Fahs in her effort to modernize the curriculum. After her mother's death, Abby becomes the matriarch of Camp Maple Hill.Less
After earning a B.A. at Radcliffe and spending five disillusioning years working with social relief agencies, Abby Adams Eliot is asked by the Women's Education Association of Boston to start a nursery school in the city. They send her to London to study the concept at Rachel McMillan's training center. Upon her return, she opens the Ruggles Street Nursery and Training School and remains its director for thirty years. Abby finds her life partner in Anna Evelyth Holman, who in 1919, goes to war‐torn France with the Radcliffe Unit to help the Red Cross. Back home, Anna teaches science at the Winsor School in Boston, while Abby carries her expertise to Unitarian Sunday School programs and helps Sophia Fahs in her effort to modernize the curriculum. After her mother's death, Abby becomes the matriarch of Camp Maple Hill.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The scene is St. Louis, where William Greenleaf Eliot (1811–1887) has brought his bride, Abigail Adams Cranch (1817–1908), the namesake of her great aunt who lived in the White House. Raising a ...
More
The scene is St. Louis, where William Greenleaf Eliot (1811–1887) has brought his bride, Abigail Adams Cranch (1817–1908), the namesake of her great aunt who lived in the White House. Raising a family and keeping them safe, the younger Abby's principal calling, becomes a rigorous test of her faith as she loses nine of her fourteen babies. When two of her sons are ordained and leave to shepherd their own flocks on opposite coasts, Abby's letters chase after them, throwing a wide net of motherly news from home and affection. She also keeps the family together by guarding the boundaries that set them apart from the unthinking people of faith and others less suited to share their social position. Her perceptions and fears of Catholics and foreigners, people of color, and blue‐collar workers betray a female complicity in liberal religion's hedging on its promised practice of parity and inclusion.Less
The scene is St. Louis, where William Greenleaf Eliot (1811–1887) has brought his bride, Abigail Adams Cranch (1817–1908), the namesake of her great aunt who lived in the White House. Raising a family and keeping them safe, the younger Abby's principal calling, becomes a rigorous test of her faith as she loses nine of her fourteen babies. When two of her sons are ordained and leave to shepherd their own flocks on opposite coasts, Abby's letters chase after them, throwing a wide net of motherly news from home and affection. She also keeps the family together by guarding the boundaries that set them apart from the unthinking people of faith and others less suited to share their social position. Her perceptions and fears of Catholics and foreigners, people of color, and blue‐collar workers betray a female complicity in liberal religion's hedging on its promised practice of parity and inclusion.
Cynthia Grant Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390209
- eISBN:
- 9780199866670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390209.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
For Etta's daughter Dorothea Dix Eliot (1871‐1957), who marries her father's associate pastor, Earl Morse Wilbur (1866‐1956), in 1898, a major challenge is teaching her husband to stay in tune with ...
More
For Etta's daughter Dorothea Dix Eliot (1871‐1957), who marries her father's associate pastor, Earl Morse Wilbur (1866‐1956), in 1898, a major challenge is teaching her husband to stay in tune with his family's needs and the politics of his profession. Taken first to a small, stingy parish in Meadville, PA, and then to Berkeley, CA, where Earl tries to run a new Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry—today's Starr King—with almost no budget, Dodie must live with the poverty Etta had only imagined. More protective of her inherited caste because of their insufficiency, she lectures Earl on how to keep low‐paid domestics busy and humble. After struggling with infertility before a daughter is born, her dependency on a lower‐class midwife is further mortification. Later, the tragic death of her college‐age son dislodges her faith, and she dies a confessed agnostic.Less
For Etta's daughter Dorothea Dix Eliot (1871‐1957), who marries her father's associate pastor, Earl Morse Wilbur (1866‐1956), in 1898, a major challenge is teaching her husband to stay in tune with his family's needs and the politics of his profession. Taken first to a small, stingy parish in Meadville, PA, and then to Berkeley, CA, where Earl tries to run a new Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry—today's Starr King—with almost no budget, Dodie must live with the poverty Etta had only imagined. More protective of her inherited caste because of their insufficiency, she lectures Earl on how to keep low‐paid domestics busy and humble. After struggling with infertility before a daughter is born, her dependency on a lower‐class midwife is further mortification. Later, the tragic death of her college‐age son dislodges her faith, and she dies a confessed agnostic.
