Read Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context

Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context

Unknown Author

4.9/5 (30164 ratings)

Description:In recent years the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell has received increasing attention within the academic literary community. The contribution made by the major women writers to the development of the realist novel in England in the nineteenth century has been acknowledged since their first appearance, but traditionally Gaskell's achievement was held to be a lesser one. For Lord David Cecil, writing in 1934, she was "a minor artist . . . with a talent that is slight": for him her representative work was Cranford, a classic, but one with minority status. For a later generation of socio-historical critics, for whom Raymond Williams set the standard, the key text was Mary Barton, her novel of Manchester industrialism, but again it was seen as something of a special case, ultimately to be defined in terms of its limitations, rather than its merits. As compared with the major figures of Victorian realism - the Bronte sisters, for example, and yet more notably, George Eliot - Gaskell was felt to be a lesser figure, whose various individual achievements need not be brought together and reviewed as a substantial corpus of material. worthy of attention in its own right.More recently this situation has changed. The title of Edgar Wright's Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment (1965) was prophetic: it anticipated a number of scholarly enterprises of the 1960s and 70s, most notably the Pollard and Chapple edition of The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), and John Geoffrey Sharps's Mrs Gaskell's Observation and Invention (1970) which have allowed for critical revision that has brought the full complexity of her achievement to the fore. Gaskell's fiction is not identifiable by the kind of single-minded agendas -whether thematic, as in the case of Charlotte Bronte, or theoretical as with George Eliot - that makes for a readily definable critical standpoint. What typifies her work is its versatility and variety, and that is as much as anything a consequence of the way in which she adapted herself to the economic demands of the Victorian literary scene. A natural story-teller, she responded readily to commissions above all by Dickens - who famously referred to her as "my dear Scheherazade" - after her first success with Mary Barton (1848), and it was this experience within the contexts of Victorian literary journalism that both established and defined her literary career. It accounts for the range of her work -stories, both short and long, novellas, essays, biography, as well as full-length novels - and it accounts also for its variable quality. But emphasis on this dimension should not blind us to the way in which her narrative art developed in both sophistication and substance. In her middle and later period she produced three outstanding novels - North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters, unfinished at her death in 1865, as well as The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), one of the finest biographies in the language, and the novella Cousin Phillis (1863), felt by many of her critics to be her most perfect single work.Within the last decade Elizabeth Gaskell has been the subject of a number of critical studies that have done justice to the full range of her work. It marks the extent of her reputation that important studies have appeared on the European continent and in the United States. In Italy Francesco Marroni's La fabbrica nella valle (1985) set up a tradition of Gaskell scholarship in that country that has been reinforced by a sequence of conferences, academic papers and reviews. This volume of essays, to which English and Italian scholars have contributed equally, is a further contribution to that tradition. Its various essays reflect a number of critical standpoints: in that sense Gaskell's own variety has been subjected to a variety of critical theory and practice which we hope will be an appropriate tribute to her own intellectual openness of mind.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context. To get started finding Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: —

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Edizione Tracce

Release: —

ISBN

Description: In recent years the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell has received increasing attention within the academic literary community. The contribution made by the major women writers to the development of the realist novel in England in the nineteenth century has been acknowledged since their first appearance, but traditionally Gaskell's achievement was held to be a lesser one. For Lord David Cecil, writing in 1934, she was "a minor artist . . . with a talent that is slight": for him her representative work was Cranford, a classic, but one with minority status. For a later generation of socio-historical critics, for whom Raymond Williams set the standard, the key text was Mary Barton, her novel of Manchester industrialism, but again it was seen as something of a special case, ultimately to be defined in terms of its limitations, rather than its merits. As compared with the major figures of Victorian realism - the Bronte sisters, for example, and yet more notably, George Eliot - Gaskell was felt to be a lesser figure, whose various individual achievements need not be brought together and reviewed as a substantial corpus of material. worthy of attention in its own right.More recently this situation has changed. The title of Edgar Wright's Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment (1965) was prophetic: it anticipated a number of scholarly enterprises of the 1960s and 70s, most notably the Pollard and Chapple edition of The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), and John Geoffrey Sharps's Mrs Gaskell's Observation and Invention (1970) which have allowed for critical revision that has brought the full complexity of her achievement to the fore. Gaskell's fiction is not identifiable by the kind of single-minded agendas -whether thematic, as in the case of Charlotte Bronte, or theoretical as with George Eliot - that makes for a readily definable critical standpoint. What typifies her work is its versatility and variety, and that is as much as anything a consequence of the way in which she adapted herself to the economic demands of the Victorian literary scene. A natural story-teller, she responded readily to commissions above all by Dickens - who famously referred to her as "my dear Scheherazade" - after her first success with Mary Barton (1848), and it was this experience within the contexts of Victorian literary journalism that both established and defined her literary career. It accounts for the range of her work -stories, both short and long, novellas, essays, biography, as well as full-length novels - and it accounts also for its variable quality. But emphasis on this dimension should not blind us to the way in which her narrative art developed in both sophistication and substance. In her middle and later period she produced three outstanding novels - North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters, unfinished at her death in 1865, as well as The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857), one of the finest biographies in the language, and the novella Cousin Phillis (1863), felt by many of her critics to be her most perfect single work.Within the last decade Elizabeth Gaskell has been the subject of a number of critical studies that have done justice to the full range of her work. It marks the extent of her reputation that important studies have appeared on the European continent and in the United States. In Italy Francesco Marroni's La fabbrica nella valle (1985) set up a tradition of Gaskell scholarship in that country that has been reinforced by a sequence of conferences, academic papers and reviews. This volume of essays, to which English and Italian scholars have contributed equally, is a further contribution to that tradition. Its various essays reflect a number of critical standpoints: in that sense Gaskell's own variety has been subjected to a variety of critical theory and practice which we hope will be an appropriate tribute to her own intellectual openness of mind.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context. To get started finding Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Special Offer | $0.00

Special Offer! | $0.00

Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context

Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context

More Books