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These essays focus on major figures, major works or major themes
and movements of the Victorian era. Each aims to fill the gap in
critical literature while reflecting the book's recurring concern
with contexts and strategems of presentation. They strive for fresh
perspectives, whether it be a fuller grounding for Browning's
poetry, a reconciliation of the contrary views Emerson and
Nietzsche held on Carlyle's narrative techniques, a clear awareness
of the role of comedy in Arnold's prose, a new chapter on English
literary realism or a look at Trollope as a crucial addition to his
era's exhaustive studies of changing and highly symbolic
parent-child relationships. John Clubbe is co-author of "English
Romanticism: The Grounds of Belief" and Jerome Meckier is author of
"Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure".
Volume 12/13 of the Aldous Huxley Annual begins with a discussion
of a lecture Huxley gave in Italian, an appraisal of his
never-completed project of a novel on Catherine of Siena, and his
recently re-discovered drawings for "Leda." Further critical
articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work follow, together
with the second Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by
Hisashi Ozawa of King's College London. A painting by Carolyn Mary
Kleefeld ushers in the second part of the book, which contains a
selection of papers from the Oxford Symposium held in 2013.
(Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 12/13)
Aldous Huxley Annual is the new official organ of the Aldous Huxley
Society and the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies. It publishes
larger essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley
and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley
would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed.
The international Aldous Huxley Society (AHS), founded in Munster
on 25 June 1998, has two chief purposes: to promote the academic
study of the works of Aldous Huxley, in particular critical
editions, commentaries and interpretations, and to make a wider
public acquainted with the thought and writings of the author.
Furthermore, the Society supports the Centre for Aldous Huxley
Studies (CAHS) at the Department of English at the Westfalische
Wilhelms-Universitat Munster, and undertakes to organize academic
meetings, further academic work of its members within the scope of
its authority and possibility, cooperate with other societies
devoted to the academic study of the works of Aldous Huxley and
send delegates to international conferences.
Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley
Society at the Center for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster,
Germany. The Society publishes essays on the life, times, and
interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. Volume 9 is the first to
have a Guest Editor: Professor James Sexton. Sexton opens this
issue with "A New Huxley Miscellany," which is followed by a
selection of lectures from the Fourth International Aldous Huxley
Symposium held in Los Angeles in July/August 2008. The issue closes
with the first Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Brian
Smith of Suffolk University. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol.
9)
" Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in
Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between
leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as
realists by rewriting Dicken's novels. In his new book, Meckier
argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David
Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins,
Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Bront?. He parodically revised his
competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their
novels as unrealistic fairytales imbued with Cinderella motifs.
Dickens darkened his fairytale perspective by replacing Cinderella
with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of
the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar
analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a
warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's
tragicomic view of the world.
" Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range
of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists
themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they
first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in
this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism
wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should
be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions
in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as
a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly
relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity,
the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own
credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by
undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope,
Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room
for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside.
Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he
strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did
best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or
repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for
expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens --
determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by
redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and
situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus
Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a
major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better
realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist
read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters
present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix
Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The
Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In 1842, Victorian England's foremost novelist visited America,
naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that
would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles
Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his
vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career.
His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no
antidote for the first. Using new materials -- letters, diaries,
and publishers' records -- Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons
for the failure of Dickens's American tours. During the first, an
informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for
copyright protection. More important, he grew less equalitarian and
more British daily, a disillusioned novelist discovering his true
self. His American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843--44)
repudiated travel books by Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and
Martineau that had either viewed America as civilization's new dawn
or voiced insufficient reservations. Having plumbed man's tainted
hear abroad, the creator of Mr. Pickwick saw everything more
satirically at home: he became a radical pessimist, a dedicated
reformer who nevertheless ruled out a utopian future. Dickens's
return visit, the reading tour intended to make his fortune, was an
ironic second coming. Thanks to poor planning and management,
ticket scalpers benefited as greatly as the much-lionized
performer. Meckier argues that Dickens's business dealings with his
American publishers were neither as smooth nor as lucrative as
legend holds, but that the novelist's health problems and his
eagerness to bring along his mistress have been much exaggerated.
In fascinating counterpoint, Meckier charts the ticket speculators'
systematic successes, the ups and downs of Dickens's catarrh, and
the steady inroads he made into the heart of Annie Fields, his
American publisher's young wife. This critical/biographical study
reshapes our view of the life and career of the giant of Victorian
Literatures.
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