{"title":"La représentation paradoxale du chemin de fer chez Dickens : fantastique et mythe au service d’une peinture de la modernité dans Dombey and Son (1848) et « No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-Man » (1866)","authors":"F. Dupeyron-Lafay","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2832","url":null,"abstract":"With George Cruikshank’s famous engraving London Going out of Town. The March of Bricks and Mortar (1829), that gives a nightmare, fantastic image of the ravages of urbanization, we can notice the innovative resort to the Gothic to deal with modern phenomena, something as yet unprecedented in the arts, and a device that will also be used by Dickens in the 1850s and 60s to evoke the railway. However, this recourse to the Gothic represents a paradox as the Gothic is supposed to belong to the dark, distant, uncivilized medieval past and it is here used to describe the new living conditions of the industrial era, and the growth of technology. Somehow, it seems logical to resort to the linguistic and symbolic tools of the uncanny to represent new, unknown and destabilizing realities, as in « The Signal-Man ». But what appears more surprising and paradoxical is the use of archaic elements, such as myth, and teratological images—as in Dombey and Son—to depict modernity. The reason may lie in the fact that trains or factories, belching fumes and staining everything about them, were seen as dangerous, all-powerful, voracious monsters and that writers were powerless in front of such disturbing, unprecedented phenomena and had to fall back on familiar, reassuring narrative techniques to come to terms with them. Describing new facts of life with old tools—this is the central paradox and the essential originality of Dickens’s fiction on the railway.","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":"84290617","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":"Brumes et brouillards de Bleak House à Heart of Darkness","authors":"Audrey Sabathier-Lepêtre","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2838","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the ways in which air is combined to water to generate mist or fog in three novels of the Victorian period (Bleak House, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Heart of Darkness). In these novels, mist and fog are recurrent and deeply ambivalent tropes. The article will first raise the following question : to what extent does the representation of fog and mist take part in the representation of the « Britishness » of the place described ? It will focus on the different interpretations of these tropes by drawing comparisons between short excerpts of the novels. It will notably draw a link between mist or fog and a double process of mythification and mystification. It concludes by suggesting that, being signifiers of blurriness, the mists and fogs depicted in the novels are characterised by the unstable or drifting quality of their meaning.","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":"77492041","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":"Sociétés chorales et renaissance de la musique anglaise, 1840-1910","authors":"G. Couderc","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3098","url":null,"abstract":"The great English choral tradition as we know it today was born along with the Industrial Revolution with the development of choral societies like the oldest, the Halifax Choral Society in 1817, while the Birmingham Choral Society, founded in 1843, was to provide a chorus for the town’s Triennial Music Festival. Those societies were fostered so as to tame, civilise and educate the potentially unruly new unskilled labour force who manned “the dark Satanic mills” of the expanding northern industrial cities and to lead them away from drink or the profanities of the nascent music-halls. Their favourite repertoire was the English oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, a genre which flourished all century long in the wake of the great religious awakening of the late eighteenth century and provided English and foreign composers with work in an opera-shy kingdom. Various social reformers, like John Curwen of Tonic Sol-Fa fame, developed methods to teach the untrained choristers how to read music, thus permitting their exposure to high-brow culture, to which the policy of the music publisher Novello greatly contributed. Paradoxically, the Renaissance of English music in the late 19th century benefited from the craze for choral singing but also somehow triggered its demise when native composers, who had assimilated the lessons of their foreign competitors and raised their standards of composition, required more from their amateur choristers, gradually forced to give up in favour of professionals, increasing the gap between popular and high brow culture.","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":"86222558","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":"« Between the heaven and man came the cloud » : John Ruskin et la représentation des états de la matière dans Modern Painters","authors":"Lawrence Gasquet","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2853","url":null,"abstract":"The works of John Ruskin attempt to define the beauty of nature, so that man may be able to recreate it, to reprocess it through art and then access truth. Whether in the spheres of painting, architecture, or geology, Ruskin strives to guide the reader’s perception, and the four elements remain at the core of his thinking. What could be acknowledged as the representation of the various possible « states of matter », to use Ruskin’s expression in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, raises various questions : « Among the countless analogies by which the nature and relations of the human soul are illustrated in the material creation, none are more striking than the impressions inseparably connected with the active and dormant states of matter. I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, that no inconsiderable part of the essential characters of beauty depended on the expression of vital energy in organic things, or on the subjection to such energy, of things naturally passive and powerless » (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, London, George Allen, 1880, 1906, p. 271). In this article, I shall try to establish a synthesis of the representations of the four elements so as to determine the role they play in Ruskin’s aesthetics.","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":"82089123","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":"The mystery of those icy climes (Shelley 269): literature, science and early nineteenth-century Polar Exploration","authors":"C. Lanone","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2855","url":null,"abstract":"Nineteenth-century science probed into the mystery of ice, from the structure of snowflakes to glaciers to Polar exploration. Literature reflects this attempt to understand the shifting nature of ice, a transparent yet deceptive—neither liquid nor truly solid—elemental structure. While glaciers become the sublime site of Romantic poetic epiphany, Mary Shelley subverts the euphoric associations of pristine settings by choosing to locate a crucial confrontation between creature and creator in the Alps, then by opting for Walton’s search for the North Pole and the Northwest Passage as a frame for Victor’s narrative. Walton’s delusion and search for an open sea ties in with the journals of contemporary expeditions, as if Mary Shelley had sensed that the jingoistic expeditions might turn into epic disasters. The loss of Franklin’s last expedition triggered an unprecedented series of rescue expeditions which allowed to map unknown areas yet also proved how shifting and unconquerable the ice remained for nineteenth-century boats.","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":"74951747","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 Westminster Review comme outil de transmission et de démocratisation de culture savante, 1824-1857","authors":"Odile Boucher-Rivalain","doi":"10.4000/cve.3089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.3089","url":null,"abstract":"Among the quarterlies which marked the Romantic Age and the Victorian Age, The Westminster Review (1824-1900) stands out as the organ of radical opinions, committed to the diffusion of culture to all classes. Founded by Jeremy Bentham, it was meant to contribute to the transmission of culture among the middle class, including the lower middle-class. From 1836 until 1840, under the influence of the younger generation of Philosophic Radicals, with John Stuart Mill at their head, its literary influence rose sharply and with the merger of the London Review with the Westminster Review, a new period of its history began. Although the decade of the 1840s witnessed a concentration of the topics discussed on political and social questions rather than literature, its literary influence was felt again under the editorship of John Chapman and his assistant editor, Mary Ann Evans from 1852 to 1854. With her contribution to the Westminster Review ending in 1857 as a result of the start of George Eliot’s career as a novelist, the heyday of the review came to an end. Its influence in the early and mid-Victorian age came from its being the major Radical quarterly in existence, the voice of social progress whose goal was the extension of education to all classes and a far-reaching transmission of culture as an agent of moral improvement.","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":"73409315","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":"De Jane Eyre à Shirley: une représentation des éléments transformée par les bouleversements sociaux?","authors":"É. Ouvrard","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2836","url":null,"abstract":"When she wrote Shirley, Charlotte Bronte was inspired by the Luddite riots which took place in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1812. Contrary to her preceding novel Jane Eyre (1847) in which Thornfield is a few miles away from the large manufacturing town Millcote, Shirley (1849) insists on the social changes linked to the Industrial Revolution. The representation of the four elements in Shirley is thus quite different from the one David Lodge analysed in Jane Eyre (« Fire and Eyre : Charlotte Bronte’s War of Earthly Elements »). The passionate and purifying fire which characterizes Jane Eyre becomes endowed with a social dimension : it reduces to ashes many factories, such as the one Sykes owns for instance (« his dressing-shop was set on fire and burnt to the ground ») ; fire is associated to revolt, hatred but also death since gunshots can be heard several times. Besides the industrial background has consequences on the water and above all on the air which is polluted by the factories and their chimneys (« Stilbro’ smoke atmosphere ») ; Robert Moore easily puts up with this tainted atmosphere, however it is quite revealing that Caroline finds it hard to breathe (« complained of want of air »). In spite of the major changes, the representation of the four elements in Shirley bears a likeness to that in Jane Eyre as can be observed with the description of some characters and of their emotions although the stress on the opposition between fire and ice is less striking. One can even wonder whether Shirley does not express some nostalgia for the preindustrial nature that is depicted in Jane Eyre, as the description of Fieldhead Hollow fifty years ago seems to imply in the last chapter of the novel.","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":"86997783","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":"« I am content with tentativeness from day to day » : Thomas Hardy et le parti pris poétique du tâtonnement","authors":"Laurence Estanove","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3104","url":null,"abstract":"In his notebooks and prefaces, Thomas Hardy dwells heavily on the elusive, non methodical quality of his writing, pointing at the absence of any philosophical coherence in his work. This deliberate artistic preference for uncertainty is visible in the poet’s hesitant stances, wavering between harsh renunciation and the relief of conscious dreaming. The Hardyan approach to life is therefore essentially a « tentative » one, and Hardy’s work functions as a set of impressions, « a series of seemings ». This constitutes a very personal form of literary impressionism which bears testimony to the modernity of Hardy’s writing, though outside the realm of modernism per se.","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":"86450275","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":"Newman polémiste et satiriste","authors":"K. Beaumont","doi":"10.4000/CVE.4766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.4766","url":null,"abstract":"Newman is widely recognized in the English-speaking world as one of its great satirical authors (though it has to be admitted that his subtle irony sometimes escapes the translators of his work into other languages, notably French !). He admirably illustrates also that literary genre so prized by our Victorian ancestors, polemic. The source of these two characteristics is to be sought in the circumstances of the composition of most of his published works, namely the various struggles in which he participated throughout his long life. But irony, satire and his typically English form of self-deprecating humour also take on in Newman’s work a psychological and even a spiritual function.This article seeks to illustrate and to analyse these various features in four of his writings : The Tamworth Reading Room of 1840 ; Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics of 1851 ; Discourses on University Education of 1852 (which will become in 1873 the first part of The Idea of a University) ; and the Apologia pro vita sua, particularly in its now little known first edition of 1864 but also in the much revised version of 1865 which forms the basis of all subsequent editions.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88237826","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}