What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within...
What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered?...
The first new translation in over a century of the brilliant epic novel that inspired Les Miserables Sensational, engrossing, and heartbreaking, TheMysteries of Paris is doubtless one of the most entertaining and influential works to emerge from the nineteenth century. It was one of France s first serial novels, and for sixteen months, Parisians rushed in droves to the newsstands each week for the latest installment. Eugene Sue s intricate melodrama unfolds around a Paris where, despite the gulf between them, the fortunes of the rich and poor are inextricably...
The first new translation in over a century of the brilliant epic novel that inspired Les Miserables Sensational, engrossing, and h...
