19th-century and Victorian Literature

Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.

An account of Coleridge's life and career which aims to be both comprehensive and searching, relying on the most up to date available information. Although arranged in roughly chronological fashion it focuses on themes and ideas, tracing the development of his varying interests and obsessions, notably in the field of psychology. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between Coleridge and James Mackintosh, his relationship with Sara Hutchinson, arguments about the reality or otherwise of his unacknowledged borrowings from other writers, the originality of his comments on Shakespeare, the course of his early interest in zoomagnetism—resumed when German thinkers abandon their initial scepticism—and the development and nature of his religious beliefs.

Surveying the representation of odors in eighty British novels written in the 1860s, this study provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit, and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveal the status of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than in others olfactory proof of their materiality. Drawing upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses, this study establishes the subtlety with which fictional representations distinguish between characters who give off odors and those who do not. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, this study argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure current understandings of the values typically attached to different classes and different genders in Victorian culture, specifically by presenting women as the bearers of materiality and genteel men as their insubstantial counterparts.

The language of crime and punishment is everywhere, especially in the context of building new global orders where old imperial relationships between the west and the rest of the world are being redefined and redesigned. This book is about one of the formative moments in this rhetorical strategy of representing empires. By looking at a variety of British narratives about India from the latter half of the 18th century onwards, it suggests that the discourse of crime was one of the major representative tools employed by the British to understand, imagine, and rule the vast country. However, to understand the full implication of this strategy for British understanding of both the colonised ‘others’ and a particular image of ‘self’, we must study the formation of this discourse not only in the context of the colony, but within the context of its peculiar importance within ‘domestic’ Britain itself. Nineteenth-century British society placed a huge amount of importance on issues of crime, punishment, order, and policing. These issues became fundamental to British claims to being a civilised nation. Naturally, they became an important part of British colonial/imperial strategy. But, since in Britain these issues were sites of contest and not consent, of debate and opposition and not unquestioned hegemonic power, they were inherently risky tools to use in building an ideology of empire. As the various readings of the narratives employing ‘fictions’ of crime offered here show, an opposition or critique of empire was formed through these fictions even as they were used to build a consensus for empire-building. The slippages and ambiguities associated with imperial narratives, then, are not products of some inherent semiotic disorder. Rather, they grew out of a particular history within which the rhetoric employed by these narratives took shape. This book is an attempt to recover the traces of that history within the various imperial fictions of crime.

This book offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen chapters are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery, or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions, and ethnic groups during the ‘long nineteenth century’. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosuè Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Ralph Waldo Emerson — along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures.

This book studies Charles Darwin's writing as literature, and The Origin of Species as the most important book in English in the 19th century, and surprisingly, one of the most beautiful. Reading Darwin's work with the kind of attention one might direct to a great novel helps reveal Darwin's own personal voice in the midst of the scientific context, helps emphasize his extraordinary handling of language and his strategies of argument and representation, while emphasizing the emotional implications of his writing. The book traces the development of Darwin's way of seeing and imagining from his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, through the On the Origin of Species, to The Descent of Man. It emphasizes the importance of his metaphors, his instinct for paradox (and their scientific and strategic uses), the ‘double movement’ of his writing, the love of nature evident in his meticulous descriptions, and the way his writing anticipated and influenced modernist or proto-modernist writers like Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. It attempts to demonstrate that Darwin's ‘tragic vision’ is often also a ‘comic vision’, and that he renders mindless nature as awesome and beautiful. For Darwin, the world was marvellously ‘entangled’ and interconnected, every organism related to every other, and each slightest detail implicated in a vast history.

That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist. This book contends that Dickens's popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. The book describes the ways in which he envisioned and engineered his cultural pervasiveness, the media that enabled it, and the posthumous processes — technological, commercial, ideological, and emotional — that have perpetuated it. The first part examines Dickens's cultural vision and practice — his model of authorship, his journalism, his public readings, his relationship with America and the machine — and the second part explores Dickens's screen and ‘heritage’ afterlives, as well as the Dickens visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’. Dickens's one‐time presence on the ten‐pound note symbolizes the book's guiding interest in the relationship between the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens's populist vision and legacy. The book argues that the aspects of Dickens's art that have underscored critical ambivalence about Dickens — his relationship with money, mechanical reproduction, and the mass market in particular — have ultimately ensured both his iconic cultural status and his centrality to the academic canon.

This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.