Victorian Afterlives The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature

by Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780199269310
• ISBN10: 0199269319
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Victorian Afterlives sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of inquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.

Author Biography

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and a Lecturer in English at Oxford University.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS	ix
INTRODUCTION	1	(8)
1. FORMS OF SURVIVAL	9	(76)
Keats's 'posthumous life'	9	(9)
Persons and poems	18	(10)
Influence and anxiety	28	(26)
Multiverses	54	(25)
'... a distant ringing hum ...'	79	(6)
2. VOICES IN THE AIR	85	(97)
.. a distinct speck ...'	85	(11)
'... one vast library ...'	96	(21)
'... the moral atmosphere ...'	117	(28)
'... snatches of old tunes ...'	145	(24)
.. hope in dust ...'	169	(13)
3. TENNYSON'S SYMPATHY	182	(88)
'the passion of the past'	182	(17)
'the return of the mind upon itself'	199	(33)
'the growth of song'	232	(27)
'a vital Sympathy'	259	(11)
4. EDWARD FITZGERALD: UNDER THE INFLUENCE	270	(72)
Alone	270	(8)
'the constant appeal of time'	278	(23)
'a certain consciousness'	301	(18)
Together	319	(23)
AFTERWORD	342	(4)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	346	(21)
INDEX	367