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George Levine - How to Read the Victorian Novel - 9781405130554 - V9781405130554
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How to Read the Victorian Novel

€ 151.59
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Description for How to Read the Victorian Novel Hardback. How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed. Series: How to Study Literature. Num Pages: 200 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: 2AB; DSBF; DSK. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 236 x 160 x 18. Weight in Grams: 398.
How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction to the genre. Using examples from the classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victorian novel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing, and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers’ strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to create serious “art” and to appeal to wide audiences; to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to their own rich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types and explores the cultural and historical developments of the novel form itself. The book also poses a series of “big questions” pertaining to money, capitalism, industry, race, gender, and, at the same time, to formal issues, such as plotting, perspective, and realist representation. In addition, it locates the qualities that give to the great variety of Victorian novels a “family resemblance,” the material conditions of their production, their tendency to multiply plots, their obsession with class and money, their problematic handling of gender questions, and their commitment to realist representation.

How to Read the Victorian Novel challenges our comfortable expectations of the genre in order to explore intensively a burgeoning and changing literary form which mirrors a burgeoning and changing society.

Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2007
Publisher
John Wiley and Sons Ltd United Kingdom
Number of pages
200
Condition
New
Series
How to Study Literature
Number of Pages
188
Place of Publication
Hoboken, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781405130554
SKU
V9781405130554
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50

About George Levine
George Levine is the Kenneth Burke Professor of English at Rutgers University where he is also Director of the Center for the Analysis of Contemporary Culture. He is the author of Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (2002), The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001), Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (1991), and The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1983).

Reviews for How to Read the Victorian Novel
"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn't actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)“Most interesting is his commentary upon the panoramic/encyclopedic nature of Victorian fiction, the commitment to recognizable generic modes, and the novelists’ interest in finding connections among diverse aspects of experience.” (Studies in English Literature, Fall 2008) "A broad-ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." (Times Higher Education Supplement)

Goodreads reviews for How to Read the Victorian Novel


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