Период викторианской эпохи был временем стремительных культурных перемен, что привело к огромному и разнообразному литературному наследию. Книга "Новый спутник по викторианской литературе и культуре" предлагает опытное руководство по литературе Британии XIX века и ее социально-историческому контексту. Это пересмотренное и дополненное издание включает вклад более 30 ведущих ученых, которые, подходя к викторианской эпохе с разных позиций и традиций, погружаются в неуправляемую сложность викторианского воображения. Книга разделена на пять частей и охватывает семь десятилетий истории, прежде чем рассматривать ключевые фазы викторианской жизни, ведущие профессии и сферы деятельности, основные викторианские литературные жанры, а также то, как викторианцы определяли свою личность, свои дома и национальную идентичность. Важные темы, такие как сексуальность, конфессиональная вера, социальный класс и глобальная империя, пронизывают подход каждой главы. Каждая глава содержит полную библиографию устоявшихся и новейших исследований.
This new revision and expansion of A New Companion is an essential guide to Victorian literature – and provides an invaluable comparative lens for our own complex, yet often archetypical, demands for authenticity and coherence in modern cultural expressions. Forty leading scholars from across the Atlantic and beyond shed light on more than three centuries of intellectual and creative generosity that lingers along a continual strand of productively studied and employed interpretive debates. For better or less than a century after the end of this age so structured and diverse an akin approach has proven illuminating or occasionally misleading – particularly in situations where scholarship reflects lack or an insensitive outrage at the time. Michael Upton's initially provocative contribution, though criticized somewhat sceptically when published in 1987, is fundamentally consistent with modern and reappraised approaches to Victorian studies that provide links and targets much closer to home. The collection's coherent appreciations of an evolution of religious perspective, changing dimensions in gender and sexual expression, imaginative priorities, evolving scientific discourses, and revelations relating to the nature of race provide new and unusual vantages of what the Victorian era not only constituted but also seemed to be. Edward Hinshaw, whose works are shaped by an assertive commitment to formalist and structuralist approaches, shifts attention from the volume's introduction to its principles. His profound Chapter Three places Lytton Strachey's influential The Art of Mr. Success (1915) within a wide British context of comparable self-help novels, such as The Training of Hymen (1882) and William Makepeace Thackeray's Observations Addressed to Young Peoples (1837). Furthermore, his extensive explanations of Oscar Wilde's problematic status as a Victorian figure merit closer study from those seeking a comprehensive understanding of his ambiguous and protean literary legacy. Mark Lawson's discussion of mid-Victorian racist attitudes and the comic exploits of Charles Dickens' magazine characters touches on the universality of parodic cosmopolitanism, whimsy, and expression that one does well to appreciate old religions in this anthology. As with Poet's though less comic texts, selections like Thomas Hughes' Tite Alone (1864) asserts character's physicality, brute action, and genetically grounded ideals of family duty and labor as antithetic to ostentatious Victorian effervescence. Debate concerning the mode and direction Victorian music assumes and leaves behind is sharply examined in Edmund Clarence Stedman's studies of later and lesser known composers. Challenging prejudgments that conceive them as increasingly ignored figures in Victorian culture, he detects and clarifies their value in terms of both popular and classical forms of art music as seen within the literary and cultural landscape of the period. To contemplate Napier Shaw's essays on social developments within various professions (including his revealing study of the well-heeled "calloused streetside veteran" among the Antipodes and Martyn Lloyd-Jones' increasingly prosperous career among evangelical Quakers), combats the belief that the cultural hierarchy placed the laboring classes in the background and prevents many students from appreciating the more compelling complexities through which Victorian society was held together during the long years between 1790 and 1870. Even the colonial and imperial exigencies that occupy many philological concerns, as explored in Chapter Nine of this revised edition, demonstrate that these questions can inspire debate and challenge the university classroom, market research analysts, and those concerned with global governance.
#литературоведение
