Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Modern - 19th Century

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Marguerite Blessington, who had been born in Ireland but spent most of her life in London, became a famous salonniere; she was generally regarded as an important contemporary author, but as no literary executor took care of her oeuvre posthumously, she soon fell into obscurity. Her novels, partly informed by the genre of the silver-fork novel, are typical examples of Romantic Victorianism, influenced by the Romantic cult of the solitary male self, by the fascination with Italy, and by the 1840s vogue of crime fiction, while simultaneously giving...

First published in 2005, this book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades through the disruption of traditional novelistic conventions. With reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork, photography and specific historical events, this book contextualizes novels by these writers within their historical moment....

First published in 2005, this collection of essays brings together British, European and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests to demonstrate the range of contemporary perspectives through which George Gissing’s fiction can be viewed. It offers both closely contextualised historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments and engages with a number of themes including: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the...