Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 / Ruth Robbins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robbins, Ruth, 1965-

Series:

Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

Transitions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pater, Walter, 1839-1894.

Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970--Criticism and interpretation.

Forster, E. M.

Pater, Walter, 1839-1894--Criticism and interpretation.

Pater, Walter.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xii, 244 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave, 2003.

Summary:

"Pater to Forster, 1873-1924" covers a period often named as an "age of transition," which exists uneasily between the apparent moral certainties of the Victorian age and the advent of a modernist aesthetics of instability and uncertainty. Ruth Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period in writings by major and "minor" writers--decadence, realism and naturalism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism--to create a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past.

Contents:

Introduction: Ways of Seeing 1

The moral imperative of clear vision 5

Clouded vision? Subjectivity and impressionism 9

Dark visions 16

Ears or eyes? 24

1. The Persistence of Realism 30

The strained case of George Gissing 39

H. G. Wells and the quarter-educated 48

Galsworthy the materialist 55

Aesthetics and the market, or the artist and the artisan; or Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf 62

2. Rhymers and Reasoners: Poetry in Transition 74

Country 80

Woman 86

City 92

3. The Strange Case of Mr Wilder: or, 1895 and all that 105

Doubles and double vision 118

1895: or, looking both ways? 125

4. Masculine Romance, Cultural Capital and Crisis 128

The Gothic and obscure vision 134

Degeneration: The context of late-nineteenth-century monstrosity 138

Telling clearly ...? The eyewitness and cultural capital 145

Dracula: (cultural) capital and (epistemological) crisis 149

The good ended happily ...? 155

5. New Women for Old: Politics and Fictional Forms in New Woman Writing 159

Defining the New Woman 159

Olive Schreiner 165

Sarah Grand: seeing things purely 173

George Egerton and impurity 179

The New Woman beyond the nineties 187

6. Conclusions? Rainbow's End: The Janus Period 192

Time and character in The Rainbow 195

Forster's connections 202.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 222-240) and index.

ISBN:

033369614X

0333696158

OCLC:

53101852