front cover of The Chronicler of Barsetshire
The Chronicler of Barsetshire
A Life of Anthony Trollope
R. H. Super
University of Michigan Press, 1990
A thorough portrayal of the events of Trollope's long and productive life
[more]

logo for Southern Illinois University Press
He Knew She Was Right
The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope
Jane Nardin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Trollope’s mother, wife, and a friend he loved platonically most of his life provided him three very different views of the Victorian woman. And, according to Jane Nardin, they were responsible for the dramatic shift in his treatment of women in his novels.

This is the first book in Sandra Gilbert’s Ad Feminam series to examine a male author. Nardin initially analyzes the novels Trollope wrote from 1855 to 1861, in which male concerns are central to the plot and women are angelic heroines, submissive and self-sacrificing. Even the titles of his novels written during this period are totally male oriented. The Three Clerks, Doctor Thorne, and The Bertrams all refer to men. Shortly after meeting Kate Field, Trollope wrote Orley Farm, which refers to the estate an angry woman steals from her husband and which marks a change in the attitudes toward women evident in his novels.

His next four books, The Small House at Allington, Rachel Ray, Can You Forgive Her?, and Miss Mackenzie, prove that women’s concerns had become central in his writing. Nardin examines specific novels written from 1861 to 1865 in which Trollope, with increasing vigor, subverts the conventional notions of gender that his earlier novels had endorsed.

Nardin argues that his novels written after 1865 and often recognized as feminist are not really departures but merely refinements of attitudes Trollope exhibited in earlier works.

[more]

logo for The Ohio State University Press
NOVEL PROFESSIONS
INTERESTED DISINTEREST AND THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
JENNIFER RUTH
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

front cover of Realism's Empire
Realism's Empire
Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Geoffrey Baker
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science’s shrinking of the world. Realism’s modernization is inseparable from nostalgia.
 
In Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction’s stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker’s book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers’ understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.
 
 
[more]

front cover of Slavish Shore
Slavish Shore
The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Jeffrey L. Amestoy
Harvard University Press, 2015

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Trollope and Comic Pleasure
Christopher Herbert
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Challenging the sentimentalized and moralized view of comedy that prevails in modern criticism, Christopher Herbert outlines a theory of comedy as a mode whose dominant motive and function is the glorification of pleasure. Using this model, he presents a detailed study of Anthony Trollope that sharply contradicts the persistent image of this novelist as a conventional writer and complacent spokesman for middle-class pieties.

The comic mode as Herbert describes it was antagonistic to the repressive moral ethos widely prevalent in Victorian England. Herbert shows how Trollope, under a mask of self-proclaimed conventionality, employed this mode in a steady, sometimes scandalous critique of the Victorian subversion of pleasure. Drawing on Trollope's unpublished notes on seventeenth-century drama and bringing to light many instances in the novels of direct borrowings from old plays, Herbert demonstrates the inventiveness and subtlety of Trollope's deployment of comic materials. Thematically organized around such subjects as Trollope's investigations of sex, his formal structures, and his principles of "realism," Herbert's study includes detailed readings of two of the nineteenth century's most ambitious exercises in comedy: The Way We Live Now and Trollope's neglected masterpiece, Ayala's Angel.

Of primary importance for readers of Trollope and students of comedy, Herbert's study will also prove valuable to those interested more generally in Victorian and modern fiction and the cultural history of the Victorian age.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter