Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Cited by 17
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2017
Print publication year:
2017
Online ISBN:
9781316855126
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316855126
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (107)
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

'Only in learning from Farina himself have I become more sensitized to the luminosity that inheres in the vernacular. Indeed, if we follow Farina along his chosen, if surprising path, we will enjoy the rewards of discovery - about character, the novel, and realism, about written worlds and the social existences we all inhabit. … [This book] has sharpened my awareness of how we use language with one another, even in my own everyday life.'

Barabara Black Source: Review 19

'Moving gracefully between the smallest units of language and the largest, Farina provides abundant insights into a range of nineteenth-century issues and texts. … Scholars of realism, liberal aesthetics, and what was once called the 'Victorian temper' will find much to interest and excite them.'

Matthew Sussman Source: Modern Philology

‘… 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 Source: The Wordsworth Circle

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.