Labyrinths of deceit : culture, modernity and identity in the nineteenth century / Richard J. Walker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walker, Richard J., 1967- author.

Series:

Liverpool English texts and studies ; 44.

Liverpool English texts and studies ; 44

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English literature.

Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.

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

Literature and society.

Social problems in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 339 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong undercurrents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those currents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. Victorian England will never look the same.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction Tracing the fragments of modernity

Part I (De)Generating doubles: duality and the split personality in the prose writing of James Hogg, Robert

Introduction

1 Speaking and answering in the character of another: James Hogg's private memoirs

2 He, I say - I cannot say, I: Robert Louis Stevenson's strange case

3 The psychopathology of everyday narcissism: Oscar Wilde's picture

Part II The stripping of the halo: religion and identity in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, James 'B. V.' Thomson and Gerard Manley Hopkins

4 A life of death: Alfred Tennyson's 'St Simeon Stylites'

5 But what am I? Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam

6 All is vanity and nothingness: James 'B. V.' Thomson's haunted city

7 Dead letters: Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Terrible Sonnets'

Part III Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker

8 A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey's confession

9 Coming like ghosts to trouble joy: Alfred Tennyson's 'The Lotos Eaters'

10 Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti's addictive market

11 The blood is the life: Bram Stoker's infected capital

Conclusion Ghost-script

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781835534038

1835534031

9781835534021

1835534023

9781846315404

1846315409

OCLC:

972076661

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access