Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

Audrey Jaffe

Published by Cornell University Press 2000

Scenes of Sympathy

Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

Audrey Jaffe
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501719974

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

Author / Editor information

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph and Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience.

Reviews

Andrew H. Miller:

Scenes of Sympathy is especially rich in its demonstration of the remarkable range of preoccupations, Victorian and current, which find their underpinning in sympathy.

Jaffe’s second book provides thorough and sophisticated readings. She draws her methodological apparatus from psychoanalytic and cinematic theory, which she handles with originality and flair. Scenes of Sympathy is a welcome addition to discussions of contemporary identity politics.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	vii
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
Part I. Sympathy and the Spi of Capitalism
1. Sympathy and Spectacle in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Open Access Download PDF	27
2. Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and the Construction of Social Identity Open Access Download PDF	47
Part II. Fear of Falling
3. Under Cover: Sympathy and Ressentiment in GaskelVs R uth Open Access Download PDF	77
4. Isabel’s Spectacles: Seeing Value in East Lynne Open Access Download PDF	95
Part III. The Aesthetics of Cultural Identity
5. Consenting to the Fact: Body; Nation, and Identity in Daniel Deronda Open Access Download PDF	121
5. Embodying Culture: Dorian’s Wish Open Access Download PDF	158
Index Open Access Download PDF	181

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 192
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Images: 1
- Other: 1 halftone
Keywords: WEST EUROPEAN HISTORY; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501719974