Novel possibilities : fiction and the formation of early Victorian culture / Joseph W. Childers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Childers, Joseph W., Author.

Series:

New cultural studies.

New Cultural Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social change in literature.

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

Literature and society.

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

Religion and literature.

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

Politics and literature.

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

Literature and anthropology.

Culture in literature.

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

English fiction.

Great Britain--History--Victoria, 1837-1901--Historiography.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 p.)

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of—and often provided the model for—texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick's enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Possibility of the Novel

1. Politics and Interpretive Discourse

2. Fiction into Fiction

3. The New Generation, the Political Subject, and the Culture of Change

4. The Novel and the Utilitarian

5. Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor

6. Feminine Hygiene: Women in the Sanitary Condition Report

7. Religion, the Novel, and Speaking for/of the Other

8. Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism

9. Mary Barton and the Community of Suffering

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-214) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9781512801583

1512801585

9780585126562

0585126569

OCLC:

44961600