Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

ISBN-13: 9780521851930 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 266 str.

Ivan Kreilkamp; Gillian Beer

Opis

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Bronte, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp reevaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This innovative study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories."

Recenzje

'… exciting and suggestive analysis.' The Times Literary Supplement

Spis treści

1. 'The best man of all': mythologies of the storyteller; 2. When good speech acts go bad: the voice of industrial fiction; 3. Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing; 4. 'Done to death': Dickens and the author's voice; 5. Unuttered: withheld speech in Jane Eyre and Villette; 6. 'Hell's masterpiece of print': voice, face, and print in The Ring and the Book; 7. A voice without a body: the phonographic logic of Heart of Darkness.