Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform
Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

Reconstructs the surprising, self-interested, at times paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class statusAdopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociological theory, social and political history, and literary history and critiqueMakes a timely contribu...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Pionke, Albert D. 1974- (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press [2022]
Schriftenreihe:Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
Schlagworte:
Literary Studies
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
English fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
Middle class in literature
Middle class > Great Britain > History > 19th century
Social status in literature
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Zusammenfassung:Reconstructs the surprising, self-interested, at times paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class statusAdopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociological theory, social and political history, and literary history and critiqueMakes a timely contribution to a long tradition of socio-literary study that both stretches back to the nineteenth century itself (i.e., Hippolyte Taine's0 History of English Literature [1863]) and engages with contemporary literary and social theory (i.e.,
Maria Bachman and Albert Pionke's The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain [2020]) Proposes a new and newly historicized theory of middle-class status grounded in absence that acknowledges the anxiety expressed by members of the Victorian middle classes about their own legitimacy and avoids the over-determined conclusions that sometimes accompany sociological readings of cultural worksReconnecting this more nuanced definition of status to the need for recognition from those in a position to be dominated, shows how Victorian novelists built into their texts a defence of their own individual popularity and of the growing popularity of fiction over poetryCombines readings, both pithy and expansive, of Victorian novels by both major canonical novelists-Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot-and less well-remembered authors, such as William North, Charles Reade,
and Charlotte Yonge Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others
Beschreibung:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Beschreibung:1 Online-Ressource (248 Seiten)
ISBN:9781399507721
DOI:10.1515/9781399507721

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