Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature

ISBN-13: 9780199269310 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 384 str.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Opis

Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Victorian Afterlives sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of inquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.

Recenzje

'Douglas-Fairhurst's excellent ear for the influential voices in the Victorian air is . . extraordinarily impressive in its demonstration of an ambitiously capacious conception of influence . . . the range of reference and allusion in the book is dizzying, . . . and the evocation of these echoing voices provides an extraordinary resonance to his discussions, especially, of Dickens' Great Expectation, Tennyson's "sympathy", and Edward FitzGerald's nostalgic savouring of the afterlives of friends and texts in memory.'