Early Victorian Novelists
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
The great novels of the early Victorian era — the sweeping moors of Brontë, the fog-laden streets of Dickens, the drawing rooms of Thackeray — did not emerge from a cultural vacuum, and Lord David Cecil's Early Victorian Novelists makes a brilliant, authoritative case for understanding precisely what shaped them. This landmark work of literary criticism examines the major prose writers of the mid-nineteenth century, dissecting their creative methods, moral visions, and the social worlds that both constrained and inspired their fiction. With elegant precision, Cecil presents each novelist as a product of their age, arguing that their artistic choices were inseparable from the Victorian ideals of duty, sentiment, and class that permeated every corner of English life. Cecil's prose is a model of lucid, cultivated criticism — assured without being pedantic, and deeply sympathetic to the imaginative achievements of his subjects. Drawing on a tradition of biographical and aesthetic analysis, he illuminates the inner logic of each writer's work, revealing the coherent artistic personalities that lie beneath familiar plots and characters. A touchstone of twentieth-century literary scholarship, Early Victorian Novelists remains essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just what these writers wrote, but *why* — and what it cost them to write it.
Author: David Cecil
Format: Paperback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
The great novels of the early Victorian era — the sweeping moors of Brontë, the fog-laden streets of Dickens, the drawing rooms of Thackeray — did not emerge from a cultural vacuum, and Lord David Cecil's Early Victorian Novelists makes a brilliant, authoritative case for understanding precisely what shaped them. This landmark work of literary criticism examines the major prose writers of the mid-nineteenth century, dissecting their creative methods, moral visions, and the social worlds that both constrained and inspired their fiction. With elegant precision, Cecil presents each novelist as a product of their age, arguing that their artistic choices were inseparable from the Victorian ideals of duty, sentiment, and class that permeated every corner of English life. Cecil's prose is a model of lucid, cultivated criticism — assured without being pedantic, and deeply sympathetic to the imaginative achievements of his subjects. Drawing on a tradition of biographical and aesthetic analysis, he illuminates the inner logic of each writer's work, revealing the coherent artistic personalities that lie beneath familiar plots and characters. A touchstone of twentieth-century literary scholarship, Early Victorian Novelists remains essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just what these writers wrote, but *why* — and what it cost them to write it.