Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1683930215 ISBN 13: 9781683930211

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion provides readers with close textual analyses regarding the role of subversive acts or tendencies in Victorian literature. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the works under review—including such canonical texts as Dracula, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes—the critics in this anthology offer groundbreaking studies of subversion as a literary motif.

For some late nineteenth-century British novelists, subversion was a central aspect of their writerly existence. Although—or perhaps because—most Victorian authors composed their works for a general and mixed audience, many writers employed strategies designed to subvert genteel expectations. In addition to using coded and oblique subject matter, such figures also hid their transgressive material “in plain sight.” While some writers sought to critique, and even destabilize, their society, others juxtaposed subversive themes and aesthetics negatively with communal norms in hopes of quashing progressive agendas.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenneth Womack is professor of English and dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University.

James M. Decker is Professor of English, Humanities, and Language Studies at Illinois Central College.

Review:

This collection of essays opens with a strong introduction by Womack on the meanings of subversion... Subversiveness seems to be a wide net in which critics are sometimes subversive; at other times authors are subversive or they invoke genres that are already assumed to be subversive. The collection addresses biographical enigmas surrounding the public and private identities of individual writers—for example, Helen Dickens and George Eliot—and offers interpretations of major works by Charlotte Brontė, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. Jeanette Shumaker contributes a cogent essay on the gender connotations of “fallen” ministers such as The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale, and Womack extends critical interest in the literary impressionism of Heart of Darkness into a thought-provoking examination of ethics via Hans Jauss’s reception theory. Readers will likely appreciate Alexis Weedon’s efforts to link the “cross-media business practices” of early-20th-century publishing to the media convergence model of the 21st century... Summing Up: Recommended...Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. (CHOICE)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1683930215
• ISBN 13: 9781683930211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218
• Editor: Womack Kenneth, Decker James M.