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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
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Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now - Reading with Hindsight (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,700
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Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now - Reading with Hindsight (Paperback)
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Envisioning today's readers as poised between an impossible attempt
to read texts as their original readers experienced them and an
awareness of our own temporal moment, Simon Dentith complicates
traditional prejudices against hindsight to approach issues of
interpretation and historicity in nineteenth-century literature.
Suggesting that the characteristic aesthetic attitude encouraged by
the backward look is one of irony rather than remorse or regret, he
examines works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope,
William Morris and John Ruskin in terms of their participation in
significant histories that extend to this day. Liberalism, class,
gender, political representation and notions of progress,
utopianism and ecological concern as currently understood can be
traced back to the nineteenth century. Just as today's critics
strive to respect the authenticity of nineteenth-century writers
and readers who responded to these ideas within their historical
world, so, too, do those nineteenth-century imaginings persist to
challenge the assumptions of the present. It is therefore possible,
Dentith argues, to conceive of the act of reading historical
literature with an awareness of the historical context and of the
difference between the past and the present while allowing that
friction or difference to be part of how we think about a text and
how it communicates. His book summons us to consider how words
travel to the reality of the reader's own time and how engagement
with nineteenth-century writers' anticipation of the judgements of
future generations reveal hindsight's capacity to transform our
understanding of the past in the light of subsequent knowledge.
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