Scenes of Sympathy Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction / Audrey Jaffe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jaffe, Audrey.

en Book Program, National Endowment for the Humanities Op, Author.

Contributor:

en Book Program, funder.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mimesis in literature.

Sympathy in literature.

Group identity in literature.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Capitalism and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Capitalism and literature.

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

English fiction.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (184 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cornell University Press 2018

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2000.

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph and Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience.

Summary:

In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Sympathy and the Spi of Capitalism

1. Sympathy and Spectacle in Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"

2. Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and the Construction of Social Identity

Part II. Fear of Falling

3. Under Cover: Sympathy and Ressentiment in GaskelVs R uth

4. Isabel's Spectacles: Seeing Value in East Lynne

Part III. The Aesthetics of Cultural Identity

5. Consenting to the Fact: Body; Nation, and Identity in Daniel Deronda

5. Embodying Culture: Dorian's Wish

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501719899

1501719890

9781501719974

1501719971

OCLC:

1031870409