Record Nr.

UNINA9910467169103321

Autore

Langbauer Laurie

Titolo

Novels of everyday life : the series in English fiction, 1850-1930 / / Laurie Langbauer

Pubbl/distr/stampa


Ithaca, New York : , : Cornell University Press, , [1999]
©1999

ISBN

1-5017-4457-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (viii, 241 pages)

Disciplina

823.809

Soggetti

English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Minor Fiction, Endless Progress: Toward a Feminist Ethics -- 2. The Everyday as Everything: Pushing the Limits of Culture in Trollope's Series Fiction -- 3. The City, the Everyday, and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes -- 4. Unbegun and Unfinished: Race, Modernism, and the Series as a Tradition -- Afterword: '"'"Enough!" -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Laurie Langbauer argues that our worldview is shaped not just by great public events but also by the most overlooked and familiar aspects of common life-"the everyday." This sphere of the everyday has always been a crucial component of the novel, but has been ignored by many writers and critics and long associated with the writing of women. Focusing on the linked series of novels characteristic of later Victorian and early modern fiction-such as Margaret Oliphant's Carlingford Chronicles or the Sherlock Holmes stories-she investigates how authors make use of the everyday as a foundation to support their versions of realism. What happens when-in the series novel, or in contemporary theory-the everyday becomes a site of contestation and debate? Langbauer pursues this question through the novels of Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle-and in the writings of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and John Galsworthy as they reflect on their Victorian predecessors. She also explores accounts of the everyday in the works of such theorists as

Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Sigmund Freud, as well as materialist critics, including George Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Her work shows how these writers link the series and the everyday in ways that reveal different approaches to comprehending the obscurity that makes up daily life.