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"Mazzeno, Laurence W"
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Twenty-first century perspectives on Victorian literature
Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.
eBook
Animals in Victorian literature and culture : contexts for criticism
This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze \"real\" and \"representational\" animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.
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The Dickens Industry
Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is president emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.
eBook
Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy' explores the critics' reaction to the work of the nineteenth-century English poet most closely associated with the Victorian era. Perhaps more than any other Victorian poet, Tennyson's reputation has waxed and waned in the century since his death. He has been alternatively sanctified and vilified for his choice of subject matter, social outlook, morality, or techniques of versification. His reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged. Laurence Mazzeno begins this narrative analysis of Tennyson criticism with an look at how Tennyson was regarded by his contemporaries, before launching a detailed examination of twentieth-century criticism. A chapter is devoted to the period immediately following Tennyson's death, when a generation of post-Victorians reacted violently against what they considered his sappy sentimentalism, cloying moralism, and insensitive jingoism. Subsequent chapters describe how critics resurrected Tennyson, highlighting both his technical mastery and his social criticism. Special attention is given to major biographers and critics such as Harold Nicolson, the poet's grandson Sir Charles Tennyson, Jerome Buckley, R. B. Martin, Michael Thorn, and Peter Levi. A final chapter focuses on the ways Tennyson and his work have been addressed by poststructuralist critics. Throughout the study, Mazzeno demonstrates that the critics' reaction to Tennyson reveals as much about themselves and the critical prejudices of their own times as it does about the Victorian Laureate and his poetry. Laurence W. Mazzeno is president emeritus of Alvernia College, Reading, Pennsylvania.
eBook
Dickens in an Age of Theory II: The Persistence of Traditional Criticism (1980–2000)
BY THE 1980S, WHAT HAD BEEN CALLED New Criticism in the 1920s and 1930s had become the conventional way of approaching literature, and ideologies of the aesthetic critics, the moderns, and their formalist disciples — once considered radical — had been superseded by new ways of examining works of fiction. Nevertheless, textual studies, biographies, and various forms of formal and aesthetic analysis continued to be published, and Dickensians of every critical persuasion kept up a lively dialogue that on occasion extended beyond the covers of books and journals.In 1981, Murray Baumgarten, John Jordan, and Edwin Eigner established The Dickens Project at the University of California Santa Cruz. Their aim was to promote a different kind of study than that found in typical graduate schools. Funded by the University of California system and engaging scholars from many other campuses, the organizers set out not only to promote scholarship but also to provide opportunities for people to “experience” Dickens and his world. For more than twenty-five years the Project has supported the Dickens Universe, a week-long celebration during which scholarly work shares the limelight with recreations of Victorian England. What the Dickens Project has done quite well is to recreate the kind of community of Dickens lovers that existed in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the community that had created the Dickens Fellowship nearly a century earlier.
Book Chapter
The Future of Dickens Studies: Trends in the Twenty-First Century
REVIEWING DICKENS CRITICISM in 2003, Frederick Karl observed that “if the present sampling of recent critical and scholarly books on Dickens is any indication of what is happening and what is yet to come, Dickens studies are more than alive and well; they have turned their subject into an iconic figure, the prose Shakespeare” (610). As Karl suggests, all signs point to continuing strength, even growth, in the Dickens Industry. Books and articles continue to appear every year as a new crop of Dickens scholars revisits the novels, stories and the journalism to find some hitherto undiscovered nugget of wisdom about Dickens's artistry or social concerns, or to apply new theories to works not yet deconstructed, historicized, or scrutinized through the lens of gender or culture. What directions such studies might take can be surmised from a brief survey of criticism written during the first years of the new millennium.Surveys and BiographiesDickens scholars celebrated the millennium by issuing a number of retrospectives and surveys that attempt to define Dickens — the man, his work, and the industry that has grown up around both — for a new generation. One of the first of such books to appear was Robert Newsom's Charles Dickens Revisited (2000) in the Twayne's English Authors series. Twenty years earlier Harland Nelson had produced a study of the novelist focused on issues important to undergraduate students.
Book Chapter
The Dickens Centenary and After (1970–1979)
BY THE TIME DICKENS had been dead a hundred years, it was possible for Philip Hobsbaum to write without equivocation that “The reputation of Charles Dickens is in no danger” (1). In fact, the centenary of Dickens's death was celebrated with public ceremonies, seminars, and innumerable publications. The tributes actually began a year early and continued for three years. In the summer of 1969, the editors of Studies in the Novel brought out a special issue on Dickens, collecting critical commentary from some of the current luminaries in Dickens studies and a few newer voices. The first of a number of essay collections, E. W. F. Tomlin's Charles Dickens 1812–1870: A Centennial Volume (1969) includes work by E. D. H. Johnson, Emlyn Williams, Ivor Brown, Harry Stone, and the novelist J. B. Priestley. Tomlin argues in an essay titled “Dickens's Reputation: A Reassessment” that, with the notable exception of Edmund Wilson, before 1950 the reading public were the real heroes of Dickens studies, keeping alive an interest in Dickens when critics found him unworthy of serious attention. Tomlin is probably correct in claiming that, at the moment of this centenary, “Dickens now enjoys a reputation among critics [Tomlin's emphasis] as an accomplished and conscious artist, far higher than ever before” (259). But Tomlin soars to heights of adulation often reserved for Shakespeare when he proclaims that “we may be confident that whatever men may be reading in another century, they will be reading Dickens” (263).
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The Birth of the Dickens Industry and the Reaction against Victorianism (1870–1914)
WHEN DICKENS DIED in 1870, there was a rush to publish memorial tributes. Among the first to appear was one by George Augustus Sala, who had worked with Dickens on Household Words and All The Year Round and been considered one of his protégés. Sala originally published a testimonial to his mentor in the Daily Telegraph, then expanded his narrative fourfold for publication under the title Charles Dickens later in 1870. Writing more a celebratory funeral oration than critical analysis, Sala claims Dickens was “as original as he who imagined Achilles' wrath, as he who conjured up Falstaff's salt humors, and who painted Satan in awful blackness” (7). Such favorable comparisons to Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton might have been expected from someone who owed his career to Dickens's sponsorship, but they are also typical of the ways Victorian critics tended to judge a writer's merits. Sala praises Dickens for discovering what the people of his age wanted, and then giving it to them — humor without grossness — and for being a model citizen. Typical of Victorian biographers, Sala focuses on the novelist's public accomplishments while saying of his private life, “it behooves me not at this time to speak” (94). Certainly Sala knew something of Dickens's mid-life crises, but as a good Victorian, he preferred not to expose the clay feet of his idol.A much longer biography appeared in the same year. Robert Shelton MacKenzie's Life of Charles Dickens (1870) is more comprehensive than Sala's and contains considerably more commentary on the novels.
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