The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature
Author | : Josephine Guy |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2024-10-14 |
ISBN-10 | : 1032927437 |
ISBN-13 | : 9781032927435 |
Rating | : 4/5 (37 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: In this important new book, Guy and Small develop a new account of literary creativity in the late nineteenth century, one that combines concepts generated by text-theorists concerning the embodied nature of textuality with the empirical insights of text-editors and book historians. Through these developments, which the authors term the 'textual turn, ' this study examines the textual condition of nineteenth-century literature. The authors explore works by Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Yeats, Swinburne, FitzGerald, Pater, Arnold, Pinero and Shaw, connecting questions about what a work textually 'is' with questions about why we read it and how we value it. The study asks whether the textual turn places us in a stronger position to analyze the value of a nineteenth-century text--not for readers of the nineteenth century, but of the twenty-first. The authors argue that this issue of value is central to their discipline.