{"title":"« I am the Resurrection and the Life » : Sydney Carton, ou les modalités du retour d’une figure familière dans A Tale of Two Cities","authors":"Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3077","url":null,"abstract":"Dickens’s preface to A Tale of Two Cities may lead his readers to consider the character of Richard Wardour (in Collins’s play The Frozen Deep) as the original model for Sydney Carton. Yet Sydney Carton appears as an altogether different type of hero, a falsely passive and indolent one. His ambiguous characterization shows a constant combination of the motifs of exclusion from and integration within a group, both at the diegetic and narrative levels. Sydney Carton’s oxymoronic characterization is never satisfactorily explained to the reader, and an analysis of the part he plays as Charles Darnay’s double simply emphasizes the motif of exclusion. An inter-textual reading of Dickens’s last novels tends to show that the double hero of A Tale of Two Cities marks the return of a familiar Dickensian figure : that of the man who is deprived of self-esteem and feels the constant urge to express the very poor opinion he has of himself, whilst at the same time finding modes of expression for something akin to passionate self-love. In that, Sydney Carton reminds one of Arthur Clennam (Little Dorrit), and announces the advent of later characters such as Pip (Great Expectations) and Eugene Wrayburn (Our Mutual Friend).","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81438449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Géologie, théologie et inquiétudes eschatologiques: William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) et les débats suscités par la thermodynamique à l'époque victorienne","authors":"Jean-Michel Yvard","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2860","url":null,"abstract":"William Thomson (1824-1907), an eminent physicist who contributed to the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, was also at the origin of a largely forgotten controversy concerning the ages of the Sun and the Earth. He used the laws of thermodynamics to calculate the age of our planet and he concluded that it was probably from 100 to 500 million years old, which was much lower than the estimations currently accepted by geologists, and threatened to put into question the darwinian theory of evolution. Moreover, thermodynamics did not only announce a gradual exhaustion of the resources of the Sun or of our planet, but also the heat death of the universe as a whole. This paper explores the uncertainties and the debates which were caused by such conceptions, which were also used, in a more imaginative way, by H. G. Wells in his famous novel The Time Machine.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86966508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pluie, vapeur et vitesse chez Turner","authors":"M. Adrien","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2840","url":null,"abstract":"The title of Turner’s painting, Rain, Steam and Speed, encapsulates the thematic description of a vast number of his works, but also evokes his swift pseudo-blot technique, which ventures to collaborate with the random laws of the elements and painting material. Indeed, his impetuous manner and use of steam-generating « thermic » colours, as he called them, reflect the subjects of his pictures which conjure up the contemporary discoveries of thermodynamics. The phrase « Rain, Steam and Speed » is also reminiscent of his programme of painting or « visuality » : his rain and steam are redolent of the mystical apophatic clouds, where spareness and asceticism are the sole means of access to the blaze of representation.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87150054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Port Sunlight, essai architectural et social","authors":"Laurence Machet","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3106","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this article is to examine the city of Port Sunlight, its history, design and originality. Created by William Lever in 1888 in order to house his newly-built soap factory, Port Sunlight is part of the numerous “factory villages” built in the wake of the industrial revolution according to philanthropic and utilitarian principles. But this article intends to show that Port Sunlight differs from other factory towns. Its careful design, elaborate architecture and public facilities epitomize the aesthetic and philosophical trends of the period and reveal a strongly ambivalent attitude towards industry and the type of landscapes it had created. Announcing Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities, Port Sunlight endeavours to solve the material problem of working class housing while also addressing other more spiritual needs.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90758762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La terre, dernier élément de Charles Darwin","authors":"M. Prum","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2857","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits in October 1881, four months before his death. This article aims at understanding the reasons for the unexpectedly immense success the book immediately met with. Darwin was at the height of his fame and the Victorians were attracted to anything that stirred up their nostalgia for land and earth. Yet Darwin’s last opus was also a brilliant plea for the theory of the accumulation of small variations (drawing upon Lyellian uniformitarism) and for a new positioning of Man in the animal kingdom that departed from the old Judaeo-Christian tradition. It could be argued that the worm became Darwin’s efficient advocate who championed his views on evolution and anti-Creationism.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74197218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Représentations victoriennes et édouardiennes des quatre éléments","authors":"Nathalie Vanfasse, Gilles Teulié","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2820","url":null,"abstract":"Le colloque 2008 de la SFEVE a Aix-en-Provence, organise et soutenu par le LERMA (Laboratoire d’Etude et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone de l’Universite d’Aix-Marseille) avait pour theme les « Representations victoriennes et edouardiennes des quatre elements ». Il s’est attache a examiner les transformations que subit la representation des quatre elements dans l’imaginaire litteraire, le discours historique et les arts visuels sous l’effet des bouleversements scientifiques et sociaux des...","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78621538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Figures de l’aventurière dans The Eustace Diamonds, d’Anthony Trollope (1873) : le refoulement d’un retour","authors":"Jacqueline Fromonot","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3075","url":null,"abstract":"However emphatically Trollope denied the fact himself, it is striking that the characterization of the key character of The Eustace Diamonds, Lizzie Eustace, conjures up Thackeray’s fictional creature, Becky Sharp, the heroine of Vanity Fair, who appeared on the literary scene some twenty-five years before. This study first undertakes to assess the influence of the Thackerayan paradigm on Trollope’s creation. The two novelists indeed portray female adventurers — manipulative, immoral social climbers and materialistic, merciless predators, as is made particularly obvious with Lizzie’s intention to keep her husband’s inheritance, the eponymous jewels.Secondly, the resurgence of a former model in Trollope appears through the aesthetic treatment of the heroine, which relies on semantic fields that already pervade Thackeray’s novel — the animalization of the two deceitful characters and the theatricality of their behaviour. And yet, contrary to Thackeray, Trollope abstains from building a fascinating character for the reader, as evidenced by the scarcer use of images and the narrator’s bluntly calling the adventuress a “liar”, which amounts to depriving her of any potential aura.This strategy of constant disqualification allows for the emergence of a clear-cut ethical position, which seems absent from Vanity Fair. In Trollope, all kinds of narrative and stylistic strategies tend to deflate the adventuress and to stigmatize a conduct unambiguously presented as shameful. Consequently Lizzie Eustace becomes a counter-model used for didactic purposes, namely moral edification. It appears therefore that whereas the Horatian satire prevails in Thackeray, the Trollopian persona’s embittered tone recalls the Juvenalian satire aimed at the fallen world it lives in.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83094627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"« A unique aura of ancient, elemental evil » : les migrations du feu dans The Great God Pan (1894) d’Arthur Machen","authors":"Anne-Sophie Leluan-Pinker","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2834","url":null,"abstract":"Fire and its derived metaphors are omnipresent components of the Great God Pan, Arthur Machen’s decadent fin-de-siecle fantasy. Machen’s nightmarish novella relates the aftermath of a failed scientific experiment on a young female patient by a neurologist strongly influenced by alchemical writings. This cerebral exploration results in the bringing to light and subsequent release of an untamable subterranean force of regression, indistinction, and dissolution embodied in the central female character of Helen Vaughan. The latter, the monstrous progeniture of the young patient and of the eponymous satanic entity, is repeatedly associated with an impure underground fire, a sign of her transgressive all-consuming sexuality. Naturally, her dark protean character is to be aligned with other late-Victorian representations of venomous females, often characterized by the presence of flamboyant motifs. The fires of growing feminist rebellion, perceived in the 1890s as a threat to the very foundations of Victorian society, certainly animate Helen’s character. Crucially, fire is subjected to constant displacements and shifts in this narrative structured like a (bad) dream : it is a circulating trope most definitely indexing Victorian fears of degeneration and decline.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72375898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Répression et résurgence du judaïsme dans Daniel Deronda : les voies de la masculinité sont-elles impénétrables ?","authors":"Gilbert Pham-Thanh","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3079","url":null,"abstract":"George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda constitutes an inspiring testimony to 19th-century patriarchal society. It explores the fault lines of the British androcentric system through the diegetic itinerary of its eponymous hero and his compatriots, who cut unremarkable figures of respectability. The text goes on to fathom the alternative openings that resurgent Judaism offers to rejuvenate the dominant males of the Christian community. Indeed, it is when the hero learns about his true Jewish identity that all the scattered elements of his literary existence fall into place — he now unerringly senses that he must embark on a Zionist expedition to the East after marrying Mirah, a Jewess he met. More surprisingly, in a text that still pays homage to male supremacy, some remarkable reformulations of masculinity tend to reorient the discourse on gender and allow for a relative blurring of the line of divide between the sexes, which still leaves the ways of masculinity quite impenetrable.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84484902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La littérature populaire du Kailyard, substrat nécessaire à la Renaissance écossaise","authors":"Jean Berton","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3087","url":null,"abstract":"This study on the popular literary movement of the Kailyard aims to show that it was a necessary step to launch the Scottish Renaissance in the twentieth century. It concentrates on the founding trilogy of The Bonnie Briar Bush by Iain Maclaren, Auld Licht Idylls by James Barrie and The Stickit Minister by Samuel Crockett. It briefly explores the characteristics of the Kailyard before suggesting ten items belonging to the genre. After examining the main trend in the criticism of the Kailyard, it has been decided to bypass the usual English point of view so as to better appreciate the ironical tone of those texts deserving a study of what they are rather than what they should be. Neo-contextualism is a fruitful approach as it enables us to highlight the link between the Kailyard and the preceding Glasgow Boys movement. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the Kailyard movement stands on a strong position between Walter Scott’s novels and the fiction of the end of the Scottish Renaissance.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76433625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}