Greiner Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0745-6
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 0 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

British realist novelists of the nineteenth century viewed sympathy not as a feeling but as a form of imaginative thinking useful in constructing their fiction.

Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated.

In Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Greiner, Rae

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathetic Realism
1. Going Along with Others: Adam Smith and the Realists
Part 1: Smith's Sympathetic Protocols
Part 2: Sympathetic Form
2. The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness: Bentham, Austen, and th eRealist Case
Part 1: Sympathy and the Case for Realism
Part 2: Persuasion and the Sympathetic Case
3. Dickensian Sympathy: Translation in Proper Pitch
Part 1: Harmonizign in Other Words
Part 2: Form's Proper Pitch
4. Not Getting to Know You: Sympathetic Detachment
Part 1: Sympathetic Detachment
Part 2: Groupthink in Conrad and James
Coda: Sympathy versus Empathy: The Ends of Sympathy at Century's End
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Greiner, Rae
Rae Greiner is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University and is coeditor of the journal Victorian Studies.