Book contents
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- 1 “All This Phantasmagoria”
- 2 Picaresque Movements
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
1 - “All This Phantasmagoria”
Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life
from Part I - The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- 1 “All This Phantasmagoria”
- 2 Picaresque Movements
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), Chapter 1 contends that silver-fork novels give narrative form to a spectral contemporary world, capturing in their topical depictions the quotidian spectacle of crowds and commodities, and the transformations of time, space, identity, and social place that were unfolding in a society permeated by the fashion system. These novels follow the broad currents of public opinion, moving through panoramas of character sketches, conversational styles, topical issues and tastes, and among the shops and sights of metropolitan life, in an effort to model for their readers the acumen and understanding of contemporary manners essential to modern life.
Keywords
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023