Difference between revisions of "McKelvy 2013"

Latest revision as of 16:34, 1 September 2019

William McKelvy. "New Histories of English Literature and the Rise of the Novel, 1835–1859." Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Ed. Lisa Rodensky. OUP, 2013.

• 42 [Scott's Magnum Opus ed] an even that has often been cited as a key juncture in the history of the novel in English.
• Scott kept the novels in his collection in the breakfast-room/boudoir
• 43: The physical segregation of certain kinds of writing at Abbotsford reflected the absence of a model of literary history that unapologetically incorporated contemporary prose fiction into a register of the nation's literary achievements.
• cites Chambers's Cyclopedia as one of the first books "surveying a historically organized literary tradition" but what were earlier organizational principles? Authors? Movements?
• 44 ...new sense of literary history relied on the declining pruchase of an older history of fiction that was divorced from national history and concepts of modernization, and frequently tied instead to an ancient construction of authorship and literary authority in which translation and trasmission were integral elements of polite literary culture.
  • cf Marotti et al on scribal transmission
• 45 Chambers...insisting that the history of English literature had recently been distinguished by 'the production of books, calculatead by their price and modes of production for the less affluent and more numerous portion of the community.'
  • quoting from his History
  • key: cheap serial circulation
• he tends still to be too technologically deterministic
• 46 John Dunlop, The History of Fiction (1814) -- A L Barbauld, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing" similar perspecive (intro to The British Novelists)
• l/u Michael Gamer, "A Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel," Recognizing the Romantic Novel, 2008
• 47 [Chambers aiming for readers in the lower orders vs elites] The new short history of English fiction -- as it appeared in Chambers's History -- was part of a different project that set out to encourage readers of different social standings and with different political and religious affiliations to be united in a common appreciation of [48] the nation's vernacular literature.