By Christopher Lane
This vigorous, available account of works via Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad explains why many Victorians nursed a adversarial imaginative and prescient of guy and society and the way misanthropy - as soon as a method of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society's excesses - became immoral and quasi-criminal. supplying a shocking new standpoint at the prior, Christopher Lane exhibits that the fans troubling us at the present time percentage many features with our supposedly ethical ancestors.
Read Online or Download Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England PDF
Similar criticism & theory books
Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics
Peter Szondi is extensively considered as being one of the such a lot exceptional postwar literary critics. this primary English version of 1 of his such a lot lucid and fascinating sequence of lectures, translated through Martha Woodmansee and with a foreword through Joel Weinsheimer, opens up his paintings in hermeneutics to English-speaking readers.
Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture)
This learn represents the 1st accomplished examine of Iain Sinclair's writing, protecting his key texts from the early Seventies as much as London Orbital. It situates Sinclair's paintings relating to a variety of significant London writers, from Blake and Dickens via to Peter Ackroyd, and gives leading edge readings from a cultural Marxist point of view.
It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006
The world over famous as essentially the most leading edge writers in the USA this day, Leslie Scalapino many times demanding situations the limits of many types within which she works—poetry, prose, performs, and extra. This remarkable quantity contains paintings from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years.
What Poets Used to Know: Poetics Mythopoesis Metaphysics
From the times of the 1st shamans, via Homer, Dante, the normal ballads, Rumi, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Lew Welch, poetry has been rooted in metaphysics. In What Poets Used to understand, Charles Upton provides poetry either as a collection of contemplative suggestions and as a key to the amassed lore hoard of the human race.
- Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life
- Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature
- Critical Companion to Charles Dickens: A Literary Reference to His Life And Work
- Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form
Additional info for Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England
Sample text
The world is the enemy of : if therefore we love the world, we are the enemies of . ” Brothers assumed his congregations would hate in Christian ways—with God’s guidance—but the difference in his sermon between misanthropes and disciples is negligible. ” When put in secular terms, devoid of conventional moral bearings, this issue became more urgent, raising doubts about whether persons were fully in command of their behavior, and what should happen to them when they lost self-control. Enlightenment tenets represented the individual as the seat of consciousness aspiring rationally to knowledge, freedom, and happiness.
As the Scottish anatomist and surgeon Robert Knox put it, “Can the black races become civilized? I should say not; their future history, then, must resemble the past. ”40 Not content with advocating such detachment, Pearson, in the midst of the Boer War, became a proponent of apartheid and, when necessary, of racial extermination in the name of national welfare: “The only healthy alternative” to the “evil” of racial coexistence was, he said, that the white man “should . . completely drive out the inferior race” (21).
As truculent idealists, misanthropes are society’s conscience and scold. 14 Dismissing the idea of harmonious coexistence, misanthropes scorn fellow feeling, to say nothing of loyalty, conformity, and altruism. Ignoring Enlightenment philosophers who claimed that humans rationally would pursue pleasurable activities, many nineteenth-century misanthropes realized they would experience more happiness spoiling other people’s. ” asks Moore. “We are weary of being good. . ” (136, 126, 185). “The misanthrope is not merely different from other men,” writes David Konstan.