Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-century Literature

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2002 - History - 372 pages
"Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth century, in terms that ranged from personal immortality to the more dispersed and unpredictable after-effects of particular words and deeds. Some of these questions emerged in the intellectual and stylistic preoccupations of individual writers. Others contributed towards the cultural atmosphere these writers shared, in which shifting and overlapping ideas of 'influence' (from the seductive touch of the mesmerist to the contagious breath of the poor) became central to attempts to work out how far-reaching were the effects which people had on one another and themselves." "Victorian Afterlives sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of enquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might help us make of ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.

From inside the book

Contents

Forms of Survival
7
PERSONS AND POEMS
16
INFLUENCE AND ANXIETY
18
MULTIVERSES
52
A DISTANT RINGING HUM
77
Vo1ces in the Air
83
ONE VAST LIBRARY
94
THE MORAL ATMOSPHERE
115
THE RETURN OF THE MIND UPON ITSELF
197
THE GROWTH OF SONG
230
A VITAL SYMPATHY
257
Edward FitzGerald Under the Influnce
268
THE CONSTANT APPEAL OF TIME
276
A CERTAIN CONSCIOUSNESS
299
TOGETHER
317
Afterword
340

SNATCHES OF OLD TUNES
143
HOPE IN DUST
167
Tennysons Sympathy
180
Bibliography
344
Index
365
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is professor of English literature and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland.

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