Title: The crisis of action in nineteenth-century English literature /
Authors: Markovits, Stefanie, 1971-
Publisher: Ohio State University Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; Literature and society Great Britain History; National characteristics, British, in literature.; Character in literature
Abstract: "We think of the nineteenth century as an active age - the age of colonial expansion, revolutions, and railroads, of great exploration and the Great Exhibition. But in reading the works of Romantic and Victorian writers one notices a conflict, what Stefanie Markovits terms "a crisis of action." In her book, The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Markovits maps out this conflict by focusing on four writers: William Wordsworth, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, and Henry James. Each chapter offers a "case-study" that demonstrates how specific historical contingencies - including reaction to the French Revolution, laissez-faire economic practices, changes in religious and scientific beliefs, and shifts in women's roles - made people in the period hypersensitive to the status of action and its literary co-relative, plot."--BOOK JACKET.
Contents: Wordsworth's revolution: from The Borderers to The White Doe of Rylstone -- The case of Clough: Amours de Voyage and the crisis of action in Victorian verse -- "That girl has some drama in her": George Eliot's problem with action -- Henry James's nefarious plot: form and freedom in the hands of the master.