Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction
by Francesco Marroni
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ISBN: 978-0-87413-090-4
Published in 2010
$35.00
John Cabot University Press Series
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Focusing on the notion of transition as a destablizing factor of nineteenth-century society, this book explores from a new critical perspective the canon of Victorian literature by regarding the paradigm of disharmony as an interpretative key to the narrative production of such authors as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing and Thomas Hardy. Even though these novelists did not share a common ideological stance, they offered an unorthodox and thought-provoking configuration of a world wrestling with its contradictions and dilemmas. But, while their novels and short stories dramatized the elements of anarchy and unrest emerging from a rapidly changing society, these novelists brought dramatically into question the ethical and sociocultural foundations of the British nation. Implicitly, their fiction posits the urgent need of a new order that, devoid of its disharmonic aspects, is capable of delineating a socially ampler idea of culture and education. Francesco Marroni is Professor of English Literature at Gabriele d'Annunzio University.
