Patrick Fessenbecker
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474460606
- eISBN:
- 9781474484817
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474460606.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book makes a new case for “reading for content,” fleshing out its theoretical claims via readings of Victorian fiction. Questioning the academic assumption that an emphasis on content is ...
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This book makes a new case for “reading for content,” fleshing out its theoretical claims via readings of Victorian fiction. Questioning the academic assumption that an emphasis on content is aesthetically unsophisticated or theoretically naïve, it argues that the new formalism, like the old, fails to recognize the limits of its own account of the experience of reading and the justifications for literary study. As the philosophical ideas in Victorian narratives demonstrate, writers of literature often use literary form as a means to convey content, and enjoying such books involves precisely engaging, thinking through, and being excited by that content. Moreover, reading for the content in this way does not require denying either a text’s aesthetic nature or historical origins, but is in fact an important way of acknowledging both.Less
This book makes a new case for “reading for content,” fleshing out its theoretical claims via readings of Victorian fiction. Questioning the academic assumption that an emphasis on content is aesthetically unsophisticated or theoretically naïve, it argues that the new formalism, like the old, fails to recognize the limits of its own account of the experience of reading and the justifications for literary study. As the philosophical ideas in Victorian narratives demonstrate, writers of literature often use literary form as a means to convey content, and enjoying such books involves precisely engaging, thinking through, and being excited by that content. Moreover, reading for the content in this way does not require denying either a text’s aesthetic nature or historical origins, but is in fact an important way of acknowledging both.
Carol Margaret Davison (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992699
- eISBN:
- 9781526124050
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor ...
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The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as “the Death Question” – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the “afterlife” of the self.Less
The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as “the Death Question” – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the “afterlife” of the self.
Ian Ker
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199601288
- eISBN:
- 9780191806582
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199601288.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter focuses on G. K. Chesterton's book The Victorian Age in Literature, published in 1913, and his illness due to heart complications. It first considers the libel suit filed by William ...
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This chapter focuses on G. K. Chesterton's book The Victorian Age in Literature, published in 1913, and his illness due to heart complications. It first considers the libel suit filed by William Lever against Chesterton and his brother Cecil before turning to The Victorian Age in Literature, which expresses Chesterton's views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature. It then discusses George Bernard Shaw's Common Sense about the War, a pamphlet published on November 14, 1914 in the New Statesman.Less
This chapter focuses on G. K. Chesterton's book The Victorian Age in Literature, published in 1913, and his illness due to heart complications. It first considers the libel suit filed by William Lever against Chesterton and his brother Cecil before turning to The Victorian Age in Literature, which expresses Chesterton's views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature. It then discusses George Bernard Shaw's Common Sense about the War, a pamphlet published on November 14, 1914 in the New Statesman.
J. Hillis Miller
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263103
- eISBN:
- 9780823266579
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263103.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) by way of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by ...
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Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) by way of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams and Martin Heidegger for communities in the real world. Communities in Fiction’s topic is the question of how communities or non-communities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to Modern to Postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fictions as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter is in part a demonstration that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes. Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, with entire allegiance to their texts, to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. This book attempts to express the joy of reading these works and to demonstrate the exemplary insight they provide into living in real communities that are always problematic and unstable.Less
Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) by way of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams and Martin Heidegger for communities in the real world. Communities in Fiction’s topic is the question of how communities or non-communities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to Modern to Postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fictions as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter is in part a demonstration that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes. Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, with entire allegiance to their texts, to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. This book attempts to express the joy of reading these works and to demonstrate the exemplary insight they provide into living in real communities that are always problematic and unstable.
Sarah Parker
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786940520
- eISBN:
- 9781789629170
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786940520.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the ...
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This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ.Less
This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ.
Helen Groth
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748669486
- eISBN:
- 9780748695171
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748669486.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, ...
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This book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typically of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind.Less
This book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typically of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind.