1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910790346803321

Autore

Schramm Jan-Melissa

Titolo

Atonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative / / Jan-Melissa Schramm [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2012

ISBN

1-107-23147-7

1-139-50825-3

1-280-77415-0

9786613684929

1-139-51789-9

1-139-10871-9

1-139-51531-4

1-139-51439-3

1-139-51696-5

1-139-51882-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xi, 289 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; ; 80

Classificazione

LIT004120

Disciplina

823/.809355

Soggetti

English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Self in literature

Atonement in literature

Self-sacrifice in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: (Unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse -- 1. "It is expedient that one man should die for the people" : sympathy and substitution on the scaffold -- 2. "Fortune takes the place of guilt" : narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram -- 3. "Standing for" the people : Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848 -- 4. Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute : Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s -- 5. Substitution and imposture : George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation -- Conclusion: Innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian



fiction.

Sommario/riassunto

Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.