Atonement and Self-sacrifice in Nineteenth-century Narrative

by Schramm, Jan-Melissa

• ISBN13: 9781107021266
• ISBN10: 110702126X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: (unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse

'It is expedient that one man should die for the people': sympathy and substitution on the scaffold

'Fortune takes the place of guilt': narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram

'Standing for' the people: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848

Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute: Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s

Substitution and imposture: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation

Conclusion: innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction

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