Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 9/14/2017
EAN 9781107181632, ISBN10: 1107181631
Hardcover, 314 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Epigraphs
1. Darwin's view from Todgers's
'A decided turn' for character and common words
2. Inductive 'attentions'
Jane Austen in 'particular' and in 'general'
3. 'Our skeptical as if'
conditional analogy and the comportment of Victorian prose
4. 'Something' in the way realism moves
Middlemarch and oblique character references
5. 'Whoever explains a 'but''
tact and friction in Trollope's reparative fiction
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index.