Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture

Published by Cornell University Press 2001

Knowing the Past

Victorian Literature and Culture

Edited by: Suzy Anger

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501720635

Overview
Contents

About this book

To what extent is it possible to know the past or to know other cultures? Can one describe the past without imposing one's own cultural, political, social, or personal preconceptions? Testing the current skepticism that insists that it is impossible...

Author / Editor information

Suzy Anger is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Victorian Interpretation, also from Cornell.

Reviews

Kate Flint, Rutgers University:

Taken as a whole, the essays not only make us reflect on the challenges of our practices as Victorianists, but they also compel us to interrogate our own stances, our own methodological assumptions, about attempting to encounter and understand artifacts from the past.

John Kucich, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

Suzy Anger's Knowing the Past assembles original and important scholarship by some of the most prominent critics in the field of Victorian studies. It offers original and important research into many areas of Victorian culture, and it assembles a number of refreshing and instructive approaches to the difficulties of producing historical interpretation in a postmodern age.

Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University:

Progress in cultural and literary studies often comes not through answering received questions but through loosening their grip upon us, giving us a new picture of what matters. Shrewd in their assessments, imaginative in their approaches, the learned essays in Knowing the Past amply achieve this sort of progress.

Christine DeVine:

Suzy Anger's timely and fascinating collection, Knowing the Past, brings together essays by a pantheon of Victorian scholars.... A compelling collection of top-notch essays.

David Wayne Thomas, University of Michigan:

Anger's introduction sets out to recuperate values of objectivity and historical knowledge on ethical and political grounds.... One testimony to the general interest of Anger's project is the very high caliber of scholars appearing in this collection.... In sum, the volume offers a fairly hopeful perspective—or at least counters a casually cynical perspective—on our prospects for knowing other times and places. It does so, however, only in part by telling us things we didn't know. Its signature move is to urge renewed and candid reflections on how we know.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Knowing the Victorians Suzy Anger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. Theorizing The Victorians
I. Text vs. Hypertext: Seeing the Victorian Object As in Itself It Really Is Gerhard Joseph Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. The Golden Bough and the Unknowable Christopher Herbert Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
3. Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology George Levine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
II. Victorians Theorizing
4. Walter Pater's Impressionism and the Form of Historical Revival Carolyn Williams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
5. Arnold and the Authorization of Criticism Herbert F. Tucker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
6. Aesthetics, Ethics, and Unreadable Acts in George Eliot Jonathan Loesberg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
III. Continuities
7. The Structure Of Anxiety In Political Economy And Hard Times Mary Poovey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
8. How To Be A Benefactor Without Any Money: The Chill Of Welfare In Great Expectations Bruce Robbins Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
9. Tracking The Sentimental Eye Judith Stoddart Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	192
IV. Victorian Meanings
10. Knowing and Telling in Dickens's Retrospects Rosemarie Bodenheimer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
11. Inside the Shark's Mouth: William Lovett's Struggle for Political Language Margery Sabin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
12. Knowing a Life: Edith Simcox-Sat est vixisse? Gillian Beer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	252
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 304
Illustrations
- Other: 2 charts/maps, 2 halftones
Keywords: Literary Studies; England

eBook

Published: August 6, 2018
ISBN: 9781501720635