Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
eBook - PDF

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative

About this book

Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.

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Yes, you can access Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative by Jan-Melissa Schramm in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. ATONEMENT AND SELF-SACRIFICE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NARRATIVE
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. Introduction
  9. CHAPTER 1: ā€˜It is expedient that one man should die for the peopleā€™ Sympathy and substitution on the scaffold
  10. CHAPTER 2: ā€˜Fortune takes the place of guiltā€™ Narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram
  11. CHAPTER 3: ā€˜Standing forā€™ the people Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and professional representation in 1848
  12. CHAPTER 4: Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute Charles Dickens and the Atonement controversy of the 1850s
  13. CHAPTER 5: Substitution and imposture George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and fictions of usurpation
  14. Conclusion Innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index