Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel

The Resource Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel
Label
Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel
Title remainder
bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel
Statement of responsibility
Carolyn Betensky
Creator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them {u2014} in and of itself {u2014} mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf"--From the Jacket
Member of
Cataloging source
DLC
Government publication
government publication of a state province territory dependency etc
Index
index present
LC call number
PR878.P66
LC item number
B47 2010
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
Series statement
Victorian literature and culture series.

Context

Context of Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel

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