1st Edition
Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now Reading with Hindsight
1 The Ambivalence of Hindsight
2 Reading with Hindsight: The Nineteenth Century and the Twenty-First
3 The Mill on the Floss and the Social Space of Hindsight
4 'If I had known then, what I knew long afterwards! --': David Copperfield and the Ambivalence of Hindsight
5 Trollope and Political Realism
6 'The things that lead to life': Ruskin and Use-Value
7 Utopia Under the Sign of Hindsight
8 Writing with Hindsight: The Victorian Novel in Succeeding Centuries
Afterword: With the Benefit of Hindsight
Biography
Simon Dentith is Professor of English at the University of Reading, UK. He has written widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, most recently in Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
'All in all this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging contribution to our continuing critical and creative questions into the twenty-first century as to how we read, write and engage with the Victorians.' - Rosie Miles, The Journal of William Morris Studies
'Simon Dentith’s rewarding and critically stimulating book constitutes a major landmark in serious, fresh thinking about the massive issue of how to read literature in time. A remarkable achievement.' - Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds, UK ’
'Dentith’s approach is exciting, provocative and rewarding. The potential vastness of the subject is handled elegantly, with each chapter tracing a different aspect of the complex negotiations of Victorian legacies, facilitated by lively analyses of textual content and historicized reception history ... Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now is a rich meditation on a complex subject, brought to life by Simon Dentith’s lucid prose and thought-provoking examples. The ramifications for reception studies and literary criticism are significant, and the arguments for the continuing relevance and potency of Victorian literature compelling.' - Times Literary Supplement
'... Simon Dentith's lively new book comes as a welcome resource, one that breaks considerable new ground ...' Review of English Studies
'Dentith’s deft management of the cacophony of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century and the intervening chaotic uproar of the twentieth century reveals throughout the text a keen scholastic ear for the lost or silenced voices in each century and an attempt to create a space in which the possibilities they held in the past or hold for the present and future can be heard and read.' - Rocky Mountain Review
'SHARP members should find this book of great interest, demonstrating as it does both erudition about a range of nineteenth-century writers, and a sense of how Victorian culture has inflected the work of recent novelists.' - SHARP News
'... this is an argument for patient understanding against debunking, for authentic hindsight against facile knowledge.' - Key Words
