Annoying the Victorians

ISBN-13: 9780415907293 / Angielski / Miękka / 1994 / 284 str.

James R. Kincaid

Opis

Annoying the Victorians addresses directly the ideology of current critical discourse. James Kincaid enlists Victorian texts to tease the reader and the practices of the critic. The author uses a unique deployment of bad criticsm, a parody of the rules of good critics, in the quest to challenge the assumptions which guide what is considered good scholarly criticism. A romp though a series of Victorian texts, both poetry and novels, Annoying the Victorians develops an absurdist criticism, which mocks respect for the text, the employment of evidence, the appeal to reason, the value of coherence, the solemn tone and importance of everything we do or say. Kincaid presents us with a comic exposure of the price paid for ritual obedience to what is demanded of critics and criticism.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 The Part Before The First Part; Part 1 Dickensian Jugglers; Chapter 1a Fattening Up on Pickwick; Chapter 2 Little Nell—She Dead; Chapter 3 Viewing and Blurring with Dickens; Chapter 4 All the Wickedness in the World Is Print Dickens and Subversive Interpretation; Chapter 5 Performance, Roles, the Self, and Our Own Charles Dickens; Part 2 Interlude I; Chapter 7 Who Is Relieved By the Idea of Comic Relief?; Part 3 Poets And Propriety; Chapter 6 Forgetting to Remember Tennyson's Happy Losses; Chapter 7a Tennyson, Hallam's Corpse, Milton's Murder, and Poetic Exhibitionism, Buck McMullen; Chapter 8 The Poem Says Meredith's Modern Love; Chapter 9 The Canonical Poetry of The Pearl; Part 4 Interlude II; Chapter 12 H. Rider Haggard's The Return of 'She'; Part 5 Fictional Strippers; Chapter 10 Words Cannot Express Frankenstein's Tripping on the Tongue; Chapter 11 Anthony Trollope and the Unmannerly Novel; Chapter 12a The Power of Barchester Towers; Chapter 13 Girl-Watching, Child-Beating, and Other Exercises for Readers of Jude the Obscure; Chapter 17 Afterword;

O autorze

James Kincaid is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, (1992).