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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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The Mysteries of Paris and London (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,819
Discovery Miles 18 190
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The Mysteries of Paris and London (Hardcover)
Series: Victorian Literature & Culture
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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In this ambitious and exciting work Richard Maxwell uses
nineteenth-century urban fiction--particularly the novels of Victor
Hugo and Charles Dickens--to define a genre, the novel of urban
mysteries. His title comes from the "mystery mania" that captured
both sides of the channel with the runaway success of Eugene Sue's
Les mysteres de Paris and G. W. M. Reynold's Mysteries of London.
Richard Maxwell argues that within these extravagant but
fact-obsessed narratives, the archaic form of allegory became a
means for understanding modern cities. The city dwellers' drive to
interpret linked the great metropolises with the discourses of
literature and art (the primary vehicles of allegory). Dominant
among allegorical figures were labyrinths, panoramas, crowds, and
paperwork, and it was thought that to understand a figure was to
understand the city with which it was linked. Novelists such as
Hugo and Dickens had a special flair for using such figures to
clarify the nature of the city. Maxwell draws from an array of
disciplines, ideas, and contexts. His approach to the nature and
evolution of the mysteries genre includes examinations of
allegorical theory, journalistic practice, the conventions of
scientific inquiry, popular psychiatry, illustration, and
modernized wonder tales (such as Victorian adaptations of the
Arabian Nights). In The Mysteries of Paris and London Maxwell
employs a sweeping vision of the nineteenth century and a
formidable grasp of both popular culture and high culture to decode
the popular mysteries of the era and to reveal man's evolving
consciousness of the city. His style is elegant and lucid. It is a
book for anyone curious about the fortunes of the novel in
thenineteenth century, the cultural history of that period,
particularly in France and England, the relations between art and
literature, or the power of the written word to produce and present
social knowledge.
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