CiNii Books - Annoying the Victorians

"Annoying the Victorians" directly addresses the ideology of current critical discourse. The author deploys a technique of "bad criticsm", a parody of the rules of good critics, in the quest to challenge the assumptions which guide what is considered good scholarly criticism. Looking at a series of Victorian texts, both poetry and novels, "Annoying the Victorians" develops an absurdist criticism, which mocks respect for "the text", the employment of evidence, the appeal to reason, the value of coherence, the solemn tone and importance of everything we do or say. Kincaid presents us with a comic exposure of the price paid for ritual obedience to what is demanded of critics and criticism.

Volume: : pbk ISBN 9780415907293

Description

What happens when bad criticism happens to good people? Annoying the Victorians sets the tradition of critical discourse and literary criticism on its ear, as well as a few other areas. James Kincaid brings his witty, erudite and thoroughly cynical self to the Victorians, and they will never read (or be read) quite the same.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Part Before The First Part
Part 1 Dickensian Jugglers
Chapter 1a Fattening Up on Pickwick
Chapter 2 Little NellaEURO"She Dead
Chapter 3 Viewing and Blurring with Dickens
Chapter 4 All the Wickedness in the World Is Print Dickens and Subversive Interpretation
Chapter 5 Performance, Roles, the Self, and Our Own Charles Dickens
Part 2 Interlude I
Chapter 7 Who Is Relieved By the Idea of Comic Relief?
Part 3 Poets And Propriety
Chapter 6 Forgetting to Remember Tennyson's Happy Losses
Chapter 7a Tennyson, Hallam's Corpse, Milton's Murder, and Poetic Exhibitionism, Buck McMullen
Chapter 8 The Poem Says Meredith's Modern Love
Chapter 9 The Canonical Poetry of The Pearl
Part 4 Interlude II
Chapter 12 H. Rider Haggard's The Return of 'She'
Part 5 Fictional Strippers
Chapter 10 Words Cannot Express Frankenstein's Tripping on the Tongue
Chapter 11 Anthony Trollope and the Unmannerly Novel
Chapter 12a The Power of Barchester Towers
Chapter 13 Girl-Watching, Child-Beating, and Other Exercises for Readers of Jude the Obscure
Chapter 17 Afterword

by "Nielsen BookData"

Annoying the Victorians

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Available at 17 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Description and Table of Contents

Details

Export