Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.

Jonathan Farina (Author)

9781107181632, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 September 2017

314 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.64 kg

'… the insights and connections are excellent and important, and further work of this kind would be valuable. With the advent of digital humanities - even in such basic forms as the computer-assisted identification of keywords - work like this promises to shape reading practices and the knowledge emerging from them.' Michael Wiley, The Wordsworth Circle

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Epigraphs
1. Darwin's view from Todgers's: 'A decided turn' for character and common words
2. Inductive 'attentions': Jane Austen in 'particular' and in 'general'
3. 'Our skeptical as if': conditional analogy and the comportment of Victorian prose
4. 'Something' in the way realism moves: Middlemarch and oblique character references
5. 'Whoever explains a 'but'': tact and friction in Trollope's reparative fiction
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]