MARC Record from Library of Congress

LEADER: 02870cam a2200325 a 4500
001 2012007346
003 DLC
005 20130131083322.0
008 120221s2012 nyu b 001 0 eng
010 $a 2012007346
020 $a9781107021266 (hardback)
040 $aDLC$cDLC
042 $apcc
050 00 $aPR468.S43$bS37 2012
082 00 $a823/.809355$223
084 $aLIT004120$2bisacsh
100 1 $aSchramm, Jan-Melissa.
245 10 $aAtonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative /$cJan-Melissa Schramm.
260 $aNew York :$bCambridge University Press,$c2012.
300 $axi, 289 p. ;$c25 cm.
490 0 $aCambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ;$v80
520 $a"Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another"--$cProvided by publisher.
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. 269-285) and index.
505 8 $aMachine generated contents note: Introduction: (unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse; 1. 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people': sympathy and substitution on the scaffold; 2. 'Fortune takes the place of guilt': narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram; 3. 'Standing for' the people: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848; 4. Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute: Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s; 5. Substitution and imposture: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation; Conclusion: innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction.
650 0 $aEnglish fiction$y19th century$xHistory and criticism.
650 0 $aSelf in literature.
650 0 $aAtonement in literature.
650 0 $aSelf-sacrifice in literature.
650 7 $aLITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.$2bisacsh
856 42 $3Cover image$uhttp://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/21266/cover/9781107021266.jpg