Ayelet Ben-Yishai
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937646
- eISBN:
- 9780199333110
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937646.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged ...
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Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.Less
Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The novel shares with all forms of narrative the potential to structure our desires as well as to reflect a reality assumed to be independent of those desires, and the relative contributions of these ...
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The novel shares with all forms of narrative the potential to structure our desires as well as to reflect a reality assumed to be independent of those desires, and the relative contributions of these two components will vary from narrative to narrative and novel to novel. The realist fiction, in short, is a more versatile creature than is allowed for in the suspicions of some modern critics. It is through this capacity that the novel may help to liberate themselves from their own narratives. Robert Scholes's anti-narrative may in fact be a component of narrative, to the extent that any narrative contains within itself a more or less implicit questioning of its own drift. The literary scapegoat, by one reading the victim of the narrative, is by another the protagonist of the anti-narrative. The narrative confesses its embarrassment by silencing the scapegoat. Unsurprisingly, Joseph Conrad and Henry James are most conscious of this.Less
The novel shares with all forms of narrative the potential to structure our desires as well as to reflect a reality assumed to be independent of those desires, and the relative contributions of these two components will vary from narrative to narrative and novel to novel. The realist fiction, in short, is a more versatile creature than is allowed for in the suspicions of some modern critics. It is through this capacity that the novel may help to liberate themselves from their own narratives. Robert Scholes's anti-narrative may in fact be a component of narrative, to the extent that any narrative contains within itself a more or less implicit questioning of its own drift. The literary scapegoat, by one reading the victim of the narrative, is by another the protagonist of the anti-narrative. The narrative confesses its embarrassment by silencing the scapegoat. Unsurprisingly, Joseph Conrad and Henry James are most conscious of this.
Walter Cohen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- March 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198732679
- eISBN:
- 9780191796951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732679.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Whereas Romantic poetry is global in its interests, the opposite position is occupied in nineteenth-century fiction by the high-canonical realist novel, especially in France and England, masters of ...
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Whereas Romantic poetry is global in its interests, the opposite position is occupied in nineteenth-century fiction by the high-canonical realist novel, especially in France and England, masters of the two largest overseas colonial empires. Although scholarship has established a link between this literature and imperialism, the logic of realism pushes toward the everyday and proximate (or at least European), and against the representation of the distant, the exotic, the marvelous. An account of the world beyond Europe is found elsewhere, in non-realist prose fiction—in the Romantic tale, historical novel, popular adventure yarn, supernatural or otherwise anti-realist story, early modernist work, fiction (Melville) of the land-based empires on Europe’s periphery (Russia and the United States), and narratives that emerge after 1850 in Latin America, Asia, and the Near East, in European languages or not. This is the moment when Europe’s global literary influence begins, on an unprecedented scale.Less
Whereas Romantic poetry is global in its interests, the opposite position is occupied in nineteenth-century fiction by the high-canonical realist novel, especially in France and England, masters of the two largest overseas colonial empires. Although scholarship has established a link between this literature and imperialism, the logic of realism pushes toward the everyday and proximate (or at least European), and against the representation of the distant, the exotic, the marvelous. An account of the world beyond Europe is found elsewhere, in non-realist prose fiction—in the Romantic tale, historical novel, popular adventure yarn, supernatural or otherwise anti-realist story, early modernist work, fiction (Melville) of the land-based empires on Europe’s periphery (Russia and the United States), and narratives that emerge after 1850 in Latin America, Asia, and the Near East, in European languages or not. This is the moment when Europe’s global literary influence begins, on an unprecedented scale.
Donna Coates
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199679775
- eISBN:
- 9780191869778
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199679775.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realism was the traditional mode for fiction throughout the first half of the twentieth century, harnessed to the call of establishing distinctive national ...
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In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realism was the traditional mode for fiction throughout the first half of the twentieth century, harnessed to the call of establishing distinctive national identities. Realism evolved very differently in these three nations, but it remained the dominant mode in the post-war decade, albeit always and increasingly in contention with and affected by modernist and, later, postmodernist influences. In the South Pacific, literary writing often began with the transcription of myths and stories from local languages, but otherwise most fiction has relied on realism, especially in the decolonizing effort to assert an accurate picture of local life as a counter to white colonial narratives. The chapter examines how the realist novel has evolved in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Pacific.Less
In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realism was the traditional mode for fiction throughout the first half of the twentieth century, harnessed to the call of establishing distinctive national identities. Realism evolved very differently in these three nations, but it remained the dominant mode in the post-war decade, albeit always and increasingly in contention with and affected by modernist and, later, postmodernist influences. In the South Pacific, literary writing often began with the transcription of myths and stories from local languages, but otherwise most fiction has relied on realism, especially in the decolonizing effort to assert an accurate picture of local life as a counter to white colonial narratives. The chapter examines how the realist novel has evolved in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Pacific.
Janet Sorensen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691169026
- eISBN:
- 9781400885169
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691169026.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter situates the emergence of realist, nationally focused fiction alongside vernacular English and cant dictionaries in order to illuminate the complex ways they position readers in relation ...
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This chapter situates the emergence of realist, nationally focused fiction alongside vernacular English and cant dictionaries in order to illuminate the complex ways they position readers in relation to vernacular languages. These genres of the vernacular present back to readers the familiar in print forms, yet do so in terms that render it unfamiliar—at once a reader's own and yet also strange. Or, they present the actually unfamiliar as, nonetheless, part of the reader's national world—what should be, but is not, familiar. English dictionaries and realist fiction of the eighteenth century create readerly expectations of discovering in a new print form what is already one's own, but also prompt a realization of the strangeness of what one might have thought was one's own.Less
This chapter situates the emergence of realist, nationally focused fiction alongside vernacular English and cant dictionaries in order to illuminate the complex ways they position readers in relation to vernacular languages. These genres of the vernacular present back to readers the familiar in print forms, yet do so in terms that render it unfamiliar—at once a reader's own and yet also strange. Or, they present the actually unfamiliar as, nonetheless, part of the reader's national world—what should be, but is not, familiar. English dictionaries and realist fiction of the eighteenth century create readerly expectations of discovering in a new print form what is already one's own, but also prompt a realization of the strangeness of what one might have thought was one's own.
Nicholas Paige
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804752992
- eISBN:
- 9780804787499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804752992.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter examines secular strategies for rediscovering the supernatural. New understandings of fiction permitted Enlightenment-era Europeans to find an acceptable outlet for their fascination ...
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This chapter examines secular strategies for rediscovering the supernatural. New understandings of fiction permitted Enlightenment-era Europeans to find an acceptable outlet for their fascination with otherworldly phenomena in the protected space of literature. In the mid-eighteenth century, “fantastic” and “realist” fiction were both understood as inhabiting an imaginative realm that was taken for “real” while readers inhabited it. The imagination itself was seen as helping to constitute reality, a move that anticipated twentieth-century phenomenology and pragmatism. This chapter concludes that it was the Enlightenment that originally gave birth to the possibility for experiencing fiction as the site of a disenchanted enchantment, one which is “real” only as long as the story lasts.Less
This chapter examines secular strategies for rediscovering the supernatural. New understandings of fiction permitted Enlightenment-era Europeans to find an acceptable outlet for their fascination with otherworldly phenomena in the protected space of literature. In the mid-eighteenth century, “fantastic” and “realist” fiction were both understood as inhabiting an imaginative realm that was taken for “real” while readers inhabited it. The imagination itself was seen as helping to constitute reality, a move that anticipated twentieth-century phenomenology and pragmatism. This chapter concludes that it was the Enlightenment that originally gave birth to the possibility for experiencing fiction as the site of a disenchanted enchantment, one which is “real” only as long as the story lasts.
Jeffrey Kinkley
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804754859
- eISBN:
- 9780804768108
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804754859.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in ...
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As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. This book examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. It investigates such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anti-corruption novelists.Less
As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of “late socialism,” public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. “Anti-corruption fiction” exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, “social unrest”—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. This book examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. It investigates such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anti-corruption novelists.
Helena Goodwyn
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526123503
- eISBN:
- 9781526141972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526123503.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines how Harkness and her contemporary W. T. Stead navigated the position of journalists with an activist agenda in a transatlantic market for socially engaged publications. It ...
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This chapter examines how Harkness and her contemporary W. T. Stead navigated the position of journalists with an activist agenda in a transatlantic market for socially engaged publications. It explores the extent to which both Harkness and Stead made use of the ‘rhetoric of progressive Protestantism’ across the generic categories of their writing: realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing. In examining the ‘clash between socialist and evangelical rhetoric’ in the context of emerging ‘modern marketing methods’, the chapter exposes the problems inherent in labels of ideological inconsistency as applied on gendered terms.Less
This chapter examines how Harkness and her contemporary W. T. Stead navigated the position of journalists with an activist agenda in a transatlantic market for socially engaged publications. It explores the extent to which both Harkness and Stead made use of the ‘rhetoric of progressive Protestantism’ across the generic categories of their writing: realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing. In examining the ‘clash between socialist and evangelical rhetoric’ in the context of emerging ‘modern marketing methods’, the chapter exposes the problems inherent in labels of ideological inconsistency as applied on gendered terms.
J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that ...
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In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.Less
In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199574803
- eISBN:
- 9780191869747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199574803.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter discusses philosophical and oriental tales. The philosophical and oriental tale offer alternative means of exploring the same preoccupations as those that drive the more familiar realist ...
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This chapter discusses philosophical and oriental tales. The philosophical and oriental tale offer alternative means of exploring the same preoccupations as those that drive the more familiar realist and domestic fiction of the second half of the eighteenth century: a fiction that self-consciously explores relations between reader and text, between disciple and mentor, between past and present generations. Where philosophical and oriental tales differ from the domestic realist fictions is in exploring these relations on the level of form and plot rather than the level of character. It is not that character is insignificant in these tales but that it tends to demonstrate the universality of the human mind and its responses to external stimulus rather than to promote the belief in the plausibility or authenticity of persons through individualizing marks or impressions.Less
This chapter discusses philosophical and oriental tales. The philosophical and oriental tale offer alternative means of exploring the same preoccupations as those that drive the more familiar realist and domestic fiction of the second half of the eighteenth century: a fiction that self-consciously explores relations between reader and text, between disciple and mentor, between past and present generations. Where philosophical and oriental tales differ from the domestic realist fictions is in exploring these relations on the level of form and plot rather than the level of character. It is not that character is insignificant in these tales but that it tends to demonstrate the universality of the human mind and its responses to external stimulus rather than to promote the belief in the plausibility or authenticity of persons through individualizing marks or impressions.
Walter Cohen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- March 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198732679
- eISBN:
- 9780191796951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732679.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The literature of empire in the Renaissance, treated in this chapter and the next, extends from national consolidation to oceanic conquest and colonization. It is marked thematically by discomfort ...
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The literature of empire in the Renaissance, treated in this chapter and the next, extends from national consolidation to oceanic conquest and colonization. It is marked thematically by discomfort with the imperial project and formally by a logic of nonrepresentation. The farther from home the conflict, the more pronounced the pressure against mimetic accounts. Thus, civil wars and intra-European antagonisms routinely receive representation, except when the work ends up rejecting the importance of the undertaking (Shakespeare’s Hamlet). But renderings of the struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Mediterranean move the issue from representation to psychology (Shakespeare’s Othello) or narration (Cervantes’s Don Quijote), as if the distance between the two cultures were too great to overcome. In the case of realist fiction, moreover, this challenge is compounded by a formal imperative to stay close to home.Less
The literature of empire in the Renaissance, treated in this chapter and the next, extends from national consolidation to oceanic conquest and colonization. It is marked thematically by discomfort with the imperial project and formally by a logic of nonrepresentation. The farther from home the conflict, the more pronounced the pressure against mimetic accounts. Thus, civil wars and intra-European antagonisms routinely receive representation, except when the work ends up rejecting the importance of the undertaking (Shakespeare’s Hamlet). But renderings of the struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Mediterranean move the issue from representation to psychology (Shakespeare’s Othello) or narration (Cervantes’s Don Quijote), as if the distance between the two cultures were too great to overcome. In the case of realist fiction, moreover, this challenge is compounded by a formal imperative to stay close to home.
