The English Novel in History 1840-1895

ISBN-13: 9780415015004 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 256 str.

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

Opis

The construction of history as a social common denominator is a powerful achievement of the nineteenth-century novel, a form dedicated to experimenting with democratic social practice as it conflicts with economic and feudal visions of social order. Through revisionary readings of familiar nineteenth-century texts The English Novel in History 1840-1895 takes a multidisciplinary approach to literary history. It highlights how narrative shifts from one construction of time to another and reformulates fundamental ideas of identity, nature and society.
Elizabeth Ermarth discusses the range of novels alongside other cultural material, including painting, science, religious, political and economic theory. She explores the problems of how a society, as defined in democratic terms, can accommodate political, gender and class differences without resorting to hierarchy; and how narrowly conceived economic agendas compete with social cohesion.
Students, advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and specialists will find this text invaluable.

Recenzje

'Invites discussion and is bound to generate fruitful controversy.' - Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

Spis treści

Preface and Acknowledgements. Part 1. Narative and Nature 1. Prologue: A Pattern and a Purpose 2.Narrative With Clouds of Glory 3. Nature Knows Best 4. Rhetoric and History: Sequence in The Bronte's, Thackeray, and Early Dickens 5. Narrative in the Wasteland 6. Moving On Part 2. The Idea of History 7. Prologue: Getting Coordinates 8. Constructing Historical (Social) Time 9. Mediate Power 10. Emergent Form Part 3. Society as an Entity 11. Prologue: The Symphony 12. Is There Such a Thing as Society? 13. The Economic Experiment with Corporate Order 14. Cruising the Boundaries of Difference: Class, Personality, System, Part 4. Dilemma of Difference 15. Difference and Duality: Club, Class, Clan, 16. Home is Where the Fault-Line Is 17. Running Costs of the Marriage Market 18. Women and Time Bibliography

O autorze

Elizabeth Ermarth