Disorienting fiction : the autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels / James Buzard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Buzard, James.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English fiction.

National characteristics, British, in literature.

Alienation (Social psychology) in literature.

Difference (Psychology) in literature.

Social isolation in literature.

Outsiders in literature.

Culture in literature.

Self in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (331 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being. Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE. Cultures and Autoethnography

CHAPTER ONE. Uneven Developments: "Culture," circa 2000 and 1900

CHAPTER TWO. Ethnographic Locations and Dislocations

CHAPTER THREE. The Fiction of Autoethnography

PART TWO. British Fictions of Autoethnography, circa 1815 and 1851

CHAPTER FOUR. Translation and Tourism in Scott's Waverley

CHAPTER FIVE. Anywhere's Nowhere: Bleak House as Metropolitan Autoethnography

PART THREE. Charlotte Brontë's English Books

CHAPTER SIX. Identities, Locations, and Media

CHAPTER EIGHT. The Wild English Girl: Jane Eyre

CHAPTER NINE. National Pentecostalism: Shirley

CHAPTER TEN. Outlandish Nationalism: Villette

PART FOUR. Around and After 1860

CHAPTER ELEVEN. Eliot, Interrupted

CHAPTER TWELVE. Ethnography as Interruption: Morris's News from Nowhere

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612935398

9786612087820

9781282087828

1282087827

9781282935396

1282935399

9781400826674

1400826675

OCLC:

367692746