| Description |
ix, 258 pages ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Wordsworth's revolution: from The Borderers to The White Doe of Rylstone -- The case of Clough: Amours de Voyage and the crisis of action in Victorian verse -- "That girl has some drama in her": George Eliot's problem with action -- Henry James's nefarious plot: form and freedom in the hands of the master |
| Summary |
"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 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-239) and index |
| Subject |
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
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Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.
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National characteristics, British, in literature.
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Character in literature.
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| LC no. |
2006013139 |
| ISBN |
0814210406 cloth alkaline paper |
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9780814210406 cloth alkaline paper |
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081429118X cd-rom |
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9780814291184 cdrom |
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