Wordsworth And Evolution In Victorian Literature

Author : Trenton B. Olsen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429640641
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wordsworth and Evolution in Victorian Literature written by Trenton B. Olsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influences of William Wordsworth’s writing and evolutionary theory—the nineteenth century’s two defining visions of nature—conflicted in the Victorian period. For Victorians, Wordsworthian nature was a caring source of inspiration and moral guidance, signaling humanity's divine origins and potential. Darwin’s nature, by contrast, appeared as an indifferent and amoral reminder of an evolutionary past that demanded participation in a brutal struggle for existence. Victorian authors like Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy grappled with these competing representations in their work. They turned to Wordsworth as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and altered his poetry in response to Darwinism, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. Darwin’s account of a material, evolutionary nature both threatened the Wordsworthian belief in nature’s transcendent value and made spiritual elevation seem more urgently necessary. Victorian authors used Wordsworth and Darwin to explore what form of transcendence, if any, could survive an evolutionary age, and reevaluated the purpose of literature in the process.

Author : Stephen Gill
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wordsworth and the Victorians written by Stephen Gill and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wordsworth and the Victorians tells the story of the flowering of Wordsworth's reputation and influence. As well as showing how poets and novelists such as Matthew Arnold and George Eliot transmitted the Wordsworthian spirit, Stephen Gill uses a mass of anecdotal and biographical material - the personal testimony of critics, scholars, publishers, and ordinary readers - to illustrate just what Wordsworth's poetry meant to his Victorian readers.

Author : Tom Mole
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691202923
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What the Victorians Made of Romanticism written by Tom Mole and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Author : Charles Morris Lansley
Publisher : Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781787071384
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics written by Charles Morris Lansley and published by Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the Romantic movement influenced Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Given that Darwin has traditionally been placed within Victorian naturalism, these Romantic connections have often been overlooked. The book cleverly follows Darwin's narrative in a search for traces of history in both science and poetry.

Author : Denae Dyck
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135033538X
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination written by Denae Dyck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Author : Clement King Shorter
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.Q1/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Literature written by Clement King Shorter and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Hugh Walker
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107600480
Total Pages : 1077 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Literature of the Victorian Era written by Hugh Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 1077 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1910, this book provides a detailed introduction to Victorian literature and the context in which it was created. The main body of the text analyses the general trends in poetry and prose during the period, providing individual chapters on major literary figures such as Tennyson, Browning, Dickens and Thackeray. Key aspects in Victorian thought are also discussed, covering a variety of philosophical, theological and scientific ideas. This is a fascinating text that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Victorian literature and the development of literary criticism.

Author : Roisín Laing
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031413822
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Roisín Laing and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Bernard V. Lightman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107028426
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Evolution and Victorian Culture written by Bernard V. Lightman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays examine the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences.

Author : Robert M. Ryan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191074667
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth written by Robert M. Ryan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth. When Darwin presented On the Origin of Species, his reading public's affective response to the natural world had already been profoundly influenced by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth presented nature as benign, harmonious, a source of moral inspiration and spiritual blessing, and a medium through which one might enter into communion with the Divine. Long after his death, he continued to be revered throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a great poet, but as a theologian with a broader following than any prelate and an appeal that transcended or ignored sectarian differences. For believers and sceptics alike, Wordsworth's poetry offered a readily accessible and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin's vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which Divinity played no discernible role and where concepts like beauty and harmony were material conditions to be explained in scientific terms. Wordsworth's theology of nature became for many readers a more effective counterforce to Darwin's ideas than Biblical orthodoxy, but it also provided an enriching context for the reception of evolutionary theory, aiding theists in their effort to reach an accommodation with the new science. As the nineteenth century's two most prominent theoreticians of nature's life, Wordsworth and Darwin competed for attention among those seeking to understand humanity's relationship with the natural world, and their disciples engaged in a productive, mutually transformative dialogue in which the poet's cultural authority influenced the way Darwin was received, and Darwinian science adjusted interpretation and evaluation of the poetry. Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth explores the broad cultural relationship between Wordsworth, Darwin, and their disciples, contextualising them within wider discussions about the relationship between religion and science in the nineteenth century.