Habit in the English Novel, 1850-1900 [electronic resource] : Lived Environments, Practices of the Self /
O'Toole, S.author.
This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.
Description based upon print version of record.
Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: An Embedded History; Nineteenth-century perspectives; Theoretical currents; Novel habits; Part I Generative Habits; 1 The Sensing Self: Dickens and the Space of Habit; Rethinking 'character': the critical tradition; Dickensian characters as 'real existences'; Dickens in the streets: an alternative view of habit; Involuntary memory vs. 'not forgetting': Little Dorrit; Flows of capital and character: Our Mutual Friend; Rethinking 'habit': 'repetition with variation'
2 Believing is Seeing: George Eliot's Past Effects'Straying afield'; Perceptual matters: scenes of habitual life; Looking backward: sensing history, sensing self; Scene-making as practice of self: toward a 'poetry of the past' in The Mill on the Floss; The 'outing' of George Eliot: 1859; Part II Patterns of Consciousness; 3 Embodied Dispositions, Meredithian Slips; Mind in movement; Mechanized minds, volatile bodies; Habitus and narrative form; Meredithian slips; 4 Passionate Possessions: Henry James's Queer Properties; 'A quality of passion and possession': letters to Hendrik C. Andersen
'A story of cabinets and chairs': The Spoils of PoyntonAfter Wilde: homoeroticism in the 'envelope of circumstances'; Coda: The Grain and the Heap, or the Afterlife of Habit; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.
Fiction.
Literature, Modern—19th century.
Literature—Philosophy.
British literature.
Culture—Study and teaching.
Fiction.
Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Literary Theory.
British and Irish Literature.
Cultural Theory.