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Atonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative /
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 Chr...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2012.
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| Colección: | Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ;
80. |
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | 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. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781139518826 1139518828 9781139108713 1139108719 1280774150 9781280774157 9781139515313 1139515314 9781107507609 110750760X 1107231477 9781107231474 1139508253 9781139508254 1139517899 9781139517898 1139514393 9781139514392 1139516965 9781139516969 |