Everyday words and the character of prose in nineteenth-century Britain / Jonathan Farina.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farina, Jonathan, 1979- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 107.

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 107

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English fiction.

Language and languages in literature.

English language--Terms and phrases.

English language.

Characters and characteristics in literature.

Fiction--Authorship--History--19th century.

Fiction.

Fiction--Authorship.

History.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Dictionaries.

Physical Description:

xxii, 286 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Summary:

"Everyday Words is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if', and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, like physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Darwin's view from Todgers's: 'A decided turn' for character and common words

Inductive 'attentions': Jane Austen in 'particular' and in 'general'

'Our skeptical as if': conditional analogy and the comportment of Victorian prose

'Something' in the way realism moves: Middlemarch and oblique character references

'Whoever explains a 'but'': tact and friction in Trollope's reparative fiction.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781107181632

1107181631

OCLC:

987426245