The Haunted Study: Social History of the English Novel, 1876-1914 - Softcover

Keating, P. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006862136 ISBN 13: 9780006862130

Publisher: Grange Books Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

The Haunted Study, a rare example of a work of literary history that is genuinely interdisciplinary, explores how the leading novelists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods came to develop so many of the attitudes that are now generally accepted as characteristically modern. The writing of fiction is not treated as though it exists in some kind of isolation, but is shown to be intimately related to other forms of social activity. Conrad, James, Meredith, and their immediate modernist successors Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf, may now seem to be set apart in a variety of crucial ways from, say, Ouida and Marie Corelli, or even Gissing, Wells, and Bennett, but all of them worked within the same rapidly changing society and were unavoidably influenced by its dominant economic, political, and cultural concerns. These influences were not peripheral, but central and formative. They profoundly affected the creation of a commercially fragmented culture as well as the nature of fiction within that culture. The Haunted Study covers an exceptionally large number of authors, from the critically despised to the critically admired, and examines the impact on their work of such factors as the professionalisation of literature, the earning power of authors, the emergence of new kinds of readers, and, disturbingly present throughout the whole period, fundamental democratic change.

About this title

Synopsis:

This study aims to place English fiction in the context of a culture in the throes of dynamic change. The period that produced Trollope, Stevenson, Wilde, Henry James and Virginia Woolf also encompassed Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Ethel M. Dell, H. de Vere Stacpole, "Boys' Own Paper" and the Religious Tract Society, and ran from the heyday of the triple-decker to the birth of the cheap reprint, and the commercial devices for selling books ran in harness with the developing profession of authorship. The author sets this flowering of literacy firmly in the social context of the developing attitudes that shaped a society in transition. While late Victorian notions were subject to traumatic change under the impact of post-Darwinian social theory, new approaches to economics, radical concepts of religion, the family, empire, there were parallel forces in play in the business of authorship and the trade of publishing.

About the Author:

Peter Keating is a literary historian who has made a pioneering contribution to interdisciplinary studies. In addition to The Haunted Study, his publications include The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Into Unknown England, Kipling the Poet, and an innovative edition of Kipling's Selected Poems. He was Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh until 1990. Nearing completion is a book on Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Also, three inter-related narratives to be called Autobiographical Tales which can be read as social history, autobiography, or fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grange Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0006862136
• ISBN 13: 9780006862130
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544