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From 1890 to 1920, the British aristocracy faded in historical importance. The culture of that period often presented aristocratic characters and typically sought to conserve aristocratic values. The fall of the aristocracy triggered astonishing literary responses. In literary works, aristocrats were transformed into warrior heroes, Scotland Yard detectives, swashbucklers, diseased degenerates, and Gothic monsters. This book explores the centrality of aristocracy to late Victorian and early-20th-century literary culture.
Included are discussions of such writers as Marie Corelli, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, H.G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf. The volume looks at major canonical authors as well as some forgotten figures from popular literary culture. In doing so, it establishes links between different types of literature of this period and challenges some important standard views on such topics as Shaw's socialism and Woolf's commitment to the common reader. A significant new addition to historical approaches to literature, this volume raises central questions about cultural processes and the nature of cultural value.
Sommario
Preface
Bibliographical References
Introduction
Histories of Aristocracy
"Do I Strike you as an Aristocrat?"--Aristocracy in Popular Fiction
Edwardian Realists/Early Modernists
Aristocracy and Edwardian Socialists--Shaw's Plays
The "Men of 1914"
Woolf's Imagined Elites
Continuities/Discontinuities: Toward Aristocracies of Fiction, Post 1920
Bibliography
Index
Info autore
Len Platt is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the Department of Professional and Community Education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. His books include Joyce and the Anglo-Irish (Rodopi), Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake' (Cambridge) and the co-edited Joyce, Ireland, Britain (University of Florida Press).
LEN PLATT is Programme Area Coordinator for Cultural and Social Studies in the Professional and Continuing Education program at Goldsmiths College, University of London./e He has published widely on literary cultures of the early 20th century and is currently an advisory editor of the
James Joyce Quarterly. He is the author of
Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (1998).
