Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
Title Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel PDF eBook
Author Timothy Gao
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Total Pages 237
Release 2021-04-15
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1108837166

Download Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Virtual, paracosmic, fictional -- Authorship, omnipotence, and Charlotte Bronte -- Plotting, improvisation, and Anthony Trollope -- Continuation, attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray -- Description, projection, and Charles.

Virtual Play in the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play in the Victorian Novel
Title Virtual Play in the Victorian Novel PDF eBook
Author Timothy Gao
Publisher
Total Pages 0
Release 2018
Genre English literature
ISBN

Download Virtual Play in the Victorian Novel Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel

Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
Title Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel PDF eBook
Author Timothy Gao
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Total Pages 237
Release 2021-04-15
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1108944892

Download Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Novel Environments

Novel Environments
Title Novel Environments PDF eBook
Author Jayne Hildebrand
Publisher Oxford University Press
Total Pages 220
Release 2023-06-30
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0192888471

Download Novel Environments Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The environment concept has shaped humanity's relationship to the natural world and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the emergence of the environment concept in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction reconstructs a longer--and a specifically literary--history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel that the environment was first transformed from an abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description--from gardens and landscapes to weather and atmospheres--to model interactions between life and its surroundings. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman environment as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development. In making this argument, Novel Environments recovers the scientific vocabulary the Victorians used to name the surroundings of living organisms. The word "environment" dominates our own way of speaking about the nonhuman world, but nineteenth-century scientific writers and novelists availed themselves of a richer conceptual lexicon, which included "environment" along with less familiar concepts such as "milieu," "medium," and "circumstance". Jayne Hildebrand's story begins at the earliest theorization of environmental forces as a dynamic influence in the life sciences, moves through the apotheosis of the idea of a singular "medium" in mid-century organicist philosophy, and ends at the conception of the planet as an environmental system at the fin-de-siècle. By showing how novelistic description helped to elaborate the environment concept over the nineteenth century, Hildebrand sheds new light on the relationship between Victorian literature and the life sciences, and reveals how literary form has shaped the ecological concepts through which we apprehend the nonhuman world.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction
Title Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction PDF eBook
Author Matthew Sussman
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Total Pages 275
Release 2021-07-01
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1108967248

Download Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

An innovative approach to literary stylistic analysis that targets students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture through provocative interpretations of style in Victorian novels and succinct revaluations of major figures in rhetoric, criticism, and philosophy.

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature
Title Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature PDF eBook
Author Richard Fallon
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Total Pages 305
Release 2021-11-04
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1108834000

Download Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel
Title Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF eBook
Author Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher
Total Pages 208
Release 2023-11
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1009271822

Download Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.