The CRISIS OF ACTION IN NINETEENTH-CENTU
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: December 11, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Audio CD
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9780814291184
Subjects: English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Regional, Ethnic, Genre, Specific Subject; Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism; Unabridged Audio - Literature Classics; 19th century; English literature; Great Britain; History; History and criticism; Literature and society; National characteristics, British, in literature
Description: "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.