Intertextuality And Victorian Studies

This book explores the recall of the Victorians, displayed by select novels ranging in time from Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea (1996) to A. S. Byatt s Possession: A Romance (1990). These Victorianist novels are complex studies of Victorian literature, society and modes of representation.

Bringing together the critical strategies of both his new historicism and intertextual analysis, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems questions the ideological operations of Victorian poems and the ideological dispositions of their authors, particularly in relation to Romantic presurcursors and pre-texts. By examining the works of eight Victorian poets - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, and A.C. Swinburne - Harrison demonstrates how the ideologies of Victorian poets are revealed by their self-consciously intertextual uses of precursors.

With the publication of his ambitious new work Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture, Antony H. Harrison continues his exploration of poetry as a significant force in the construction of English culture from 1837-1900. In chapters focusing on Victorian medievalist discourse, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Christina Rossetti, Harrison examines a range of Victorian poems in order to show the cultural work they accomplish. He illuminates, for example, such culturally prominent Victorian mythologies as the exaltation of motherhood, the Romanic appropriation of transcendent art, and the idealization of the gypsy as a culturally alien, exotic Other. His investigation of the ways in which the authors intervene in the discourses that articulate such mythologies and thereby accrue cultural power--along with his analysis of what constitutes "cultural power"--are original contributions to the field of Victorian studies. "The power of Victorian poetry by midcentury was enhanced by the institutionalization of particular channels through which it circulated," Harrison writes. "poetry was 'consumed' in more varied forms than was other literature." Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture has implications for both cultural studies and the study of literature outside the Victorian period.

Theories of intertextuality suggest that meaning in a text can only ever be understood in relation to other texts; no work stands alone but is interlinked with the tradition that came before it and the context in which it is produced. This idea of intertextuality is crucial to understanding literary studies today. Graham Allen deftly introduces the topic and relates its significance to key theories and movements in the study of literature. The second edition of this important guide to intertextuality: outlines the history and contemporary use of the term incorporates a wealth of illuminating examples from literature and culture includes a new, expanded conclusion on the future of intertextuality examines the politics and aesthetics of the term relates intertextuality to global cultures and new media. Looking at intertextuality in relation to structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism and psychoanalytic theory, this is a fascinating and useful guide for all students of literature and culture.

Women's Literary Portraits in the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Novel is a dialogical and intertextual journey through the pages of nineteenth-century novels and their modern, revisionary counterparts. It is the book not only dedicated to the readers associated with academia, but also to all literature enthusiasts, students of literature, and those readers who are fascinated by the Victorian novel, as well as by its current neo-Victorian revival. The focus of this work revolves around the literary portrayals of Victorian and neo-Victorian women who, as the authoress believes, are located in the centre of socio-cultural and historical narratives shaping both the past and the present. Nineteenth-century narratives concerning women's placement and status in the Victorian social landscape are currently revived on the pages of neo-Victorian novels, thus attesting to the unceasing interest in the bygone. While neo-Victorian revisionary fiction endows nineteenth-century women with a redemptive potential, it also exposes modern paradoxes and ambiguities connected with universal expectations towards women, what further approximates our contemporaneity to the Victorian past. While examining these socio-cultural ambivalences, the authoress celebrates Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in their attempts to thrive as individuals. Consequently, the book studies Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in relation to their identities, unique voices and textual garments.

Intertextual Dialogue with the Victorian Past in the Contemporary Novel examines the revival of the Victorian age in several novels representative of the prominent neo-Victorian (or Victorianist) trend in recent English fiction. The aim of this book is to categorise the new genre by using concepts derived from the theory of intertextuality. The novels selected for analysis are predicated on the interaction of contemporary and Victorian texts. First, the book charts the evolution of attitudes to the Victorian age and investigates possible reasons for the current creative engagement with Victorianism. In the second part it offers a schema for the classification of Victorianist fiction, whereas it finally presents detailed analyses of the chosen novels.

Papers presented at a two day national seminar on "Globalization : a challenge to educational management."

This title was first published in 2003. Though Friedrich Schiller enjoyed prominent literary standing and great popularity in nineteenth century literary England, his influence has been largely neglected in recent scholarship on the period. With George Eliot and Schiller: Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse, Deborah Guth explores the substantial evidence of the importance of the playwright and philosopher's thought to Eliot's novelistic art. Guth demonstrates the relationship of Schiller's work to Eliot's plotting of moral vision, the tensions in her work between realism and idealism (which an understanding of Schiller redefines substantially), and her aesthetics. The specific focus of the study is the Schillerian subtext of George Eliot's work and a resultant reassessment of her realism. However, the intertextual methodology, applications of Iser's thinking on the translatability of cultures, and a placement of Eliot in a German context serve as a gateway for reconsidering Eliot's contributions in these areas, as well. While recent scholarship on Eliot has focused on gender analysis, New Historicism and cultural materialism, the frame remains largely English. Guth contends that the immense continental underpinnings of Eliot's writing should lead us to re-situate her beyond national boundaries, and view her as a major European, as well as English, writer.

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays therein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.

Dante beyond influence is the first study to conceptualise and historicise the hermeneutic turn in Dante reception history and Victorian cultural history, charting its development across intellectual realms, agents and forms of readerly and writerly engagement. Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book conducts a material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante through Victorian periodicals, mass-publishing, traditional and Extramural higher education. The book demonstrates that the transformation of Dante from object of amateur interest (dantophilia) to subject of systematic interpretive endeavours (dantismo) reflected paradigmatic changes in Victorian intellectual and socio-cultural history.