Christine DeVine

First published in 2005, this book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades through the disruption of traditional novelistic conventions. With reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork, photography and specific historical events, this book contextualizes novels by these writers within their historical moment. In doing so, it illuminates the relationship between fiction and history in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century fiction. This book will be of interest to those studying late nineteenth-century literature and history.

Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells

Mary Ann Wilson

North and South is a multi-dimensional look at a prevailing theme in current discourse on the concept of borders. This collection of essays invites us to cross historical, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. The contributors consider a range of primary texts, use a number of critical approaches, and make some surprising connections. The borders created by the concepts of “north” and “south” provoke us to ask if the terms continue to represent real divisions, or if usage and habit have drained them of any real meaning. And how have literary texts sought to represent and elucidate the divisions and to complicate and undermine such rigid categories? This collection of essays considers such questions and offers some tentative and original answers. The essays in North and South treat a wide variety of topics, generically and geographically, chronologically and creatively. They interrogate the elusive topic of boundaries symbolic and literal; boundaries as means of communication rather than division; boundaries that create borderlands; boundaries that invite transgression; boundaries that resist erasure. Across and within these boundaries, the theme of identity emerges: international, national, regional, gendered, racial, ethnic.

Essays on Gender, Race and Region

North and South

Marie Hendry

From the Irish Cailleach and other shape-shifters of folk legends to modern movie “transformers”; from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the moment when Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect in Kafka’s novella; from conversion narratives to slave narratives, turning points and transformations have always been central to literary works and to cultural developments. In fact, with Freytag’s pyramid in mind, one could claim that all literary works focus on the trope of a transformation born of a turning point, because such moments comprise the very essence and vitality of human life and culture. But why are turning points necessarily transformational and in what way? And what brings about those turning points in language, literature, culture and human lives? These are essentially the questions the essays in this volume seek to answer. The contributors examine turning points and transformations – personal, literary and cultural – brought about through the randomness of the universe as well as through human interference, and discuss ways in which humans in general and writers in particular, through their art, experience and cope with the ineluctable results.

Essays on Language, Literature and Culture

Turning Points and Transformations

This book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century-a time when the class system in England was in a state of flux-a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades. By disrupting traditional novelistic conventions, these writers reveal the ideology of the historical moment in which those conventions obtained, thereby questioning the 'naturalness' of class assumed by earlier, middle-class Victorian writers. The book contextualizes novels by these writers within their historical moment with reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork or photography, and specific historical events. It illuminates the relationship between fiction and history in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and especially the relationship between changing depictions of class and the development of realism. Examining the nineteenth-century English novel through the lens of social class allows the twenty-first century critic and student not only to understand the issues at stake in much Victorian fiction, but also to recognize powerful present-day vestiges of this social class system.

With cheaper publishing costs and the explosion of periodical publishing, the influence of New World travel narratives was greater during the nineteenth century than ever before, as they offered an understanding not only of America through British eyes, but also a lens though which nineteenth-century Britain could view itself. Despite the differences in purpose and method, the writers and artists discussed in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World-from Fanny Wright arriving in America in 1818 to the return of Henry James in 1904, and including Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others, as well as artists such as Eyre Crowe-all contributed to the continued building of America as a construct for audiences at home. These travelers' stories and images thus presented an idea of America over which Britons could crow about their own supposed sophistication, and a democratic model through which to posit their own future, all of which suggests the importance of transatlantic travel writing and the ’idea of America’ to nineteenth-century Britain.

Christine DeVine

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