Overview
- Demonstrates how Victorian historians tended to avoid writing about their own era, and shows how those rare historians who did write contemporary history anxiously defended themselves against criticism from both peers and successors
- Shows how a group of mid-century novelists used retrospective provincial novels to give voice to apparently ‘unhistoric’ individuals, and to challenge views both of national progress and decline
- Identifies two key dimensions to the challenge of contemporary-history-writing: the temporal and the social
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (9 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Victorian Historians and the Recent Past: Harriet Martineau, J. R. Green, Spencer Walpole, and Charlotte M. Yonge
-
Front Matter
-
-
Victorian Novelists and the Recent Past: Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“It is rigorous in the research base on which it draws; it is original and distinctive in its carefully and subtly developed argument ... . The work is conceptually sophisticated yet lucid and accessible.” (Prof David Amigoni, Keele University, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Helen Kingstone is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses the relationship between memory and history in the nineteenth century, focusing on how writers in different genres and forms approached contemporary history. Other publications include a chapter in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Palgrave, 2016), and work on scientific ideas of progress in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and in Historicising Humans ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past
Book Subtitle: Memory, History, Fiction
Authors: Helen Kingstone
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49550-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-49549-1Published: 11 April 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-84186-1Published: 20 July 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-49550-7Published: 30 March 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 244
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary History, Intellectual Studies