Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink
- 1 Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History
- 2 Other People's Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy
- 3 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part I: Sympathy – a Family Affair?
- 4 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part II: Which Family Values?
- 5 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part III: ‘The Torn Nest is Pierced by the Thorns’ –Sympathy after the Family
- Envoi: Sympathetic Magic
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink
- 1 Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History
- 2 Other People's Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy
- 3 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part I: Sympathy – a Family Affair?
- 4 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part II: Which Family Values?
- 5 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part III: ‘The Torn Nest is Pierced by the Thorns’ –Sympathy after the Family
- Envoi: Sympathetic Magic
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Only we, who are now living, can give a ‘meaning’ to the past … It is pointless to complain that the bourgeoisie have not been communitarians, or that the Levellers did not introduce an anarcho-syndicalist society. What we may do, rather, is identify with certain values which past actors upheld … In the end we also will be dead, and our own lives will lie inert within the finished process, our intentions assimilated within a past event which we never intended. What we may hope is that the men and women of the future will reach back to us, will affirm and renew our meanings, and make our history intelligible within their own present tense …and …transmute some part of our process into their progress.
E.P. ThompsonIn 1988, DA Miller made an influential diagnosis of ‘a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police’. His book, The Novel and the Police, was designed to challenge what he saw as a politically conservative ‘consensus’ in departments of English that ‘literature exercises a destabilising function in our culture’. In opposition to that ‘consensus’ a new school of critics, authors of books with valiant titles like Resisting Novels, set themselves to argue that the function of literature was to act as vehicle for ideological control. The irresistible conclusion was that this was particularly true of literary forms distinctive of the bourgeois era, and thus of the Victorian novel above all.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Fiction and the Insights of SympathyAn Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2007