Amnesiac selves
Subtitle: nostalgia, forgetting, and British fiction, 1810-1870
By: Nicholas Dames.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 298
Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Amnesia in literature; Psychological fiction, English -- History and criticism; Autobiographical memory in literature; Loss (Psychology) in literature; Nostalgia in literature; Memory in literature; Self in literature
Description: "With the novelistic achievements of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf in mind, we have come to understand the novel as an art form intimately tied to the impulses and processes of memory, and novel writing as a heroic act of preservation. However, in the Victorian novel, as Nicholas Dames contends in this original study, memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat.

Based on an investigation of representative British novels during the years 1810-1870, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate detailed remembrance. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of recollection in the nineteenth-century novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory.

By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Dames evokes a novelistic world and a culture engaged in forming a modern nostalgia whose origins our own time has largely forgotten."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-292) and index.