{"title":"Haggard's Questioning of the Heroic","authors":"John Coates","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5804","url":null,"abstract":"Rider Haggard is sometimes thought of as a writer who offered thrilling incidents, racial stereotypes and imperialist propaganda, or as a naive myth-maker, unlocking his subconscious and reaching out to ours. Concentrating on \"Eric Brighteyes\" (1891) and \"Narda the Lily\" (1892), this paper argues that Haggard was far more nuanced and self-aware than is commonly supposed. The two novels explore his misgivings about the warrior ethic and competitive heroic societies.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81360995","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":"‘Thou Whole Burnt-Offering!’1 The Mystical Ecstasy in Christina Rossetti’s Poems","authors":"Bertrand Lentsch","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5849","url":null,"abstract":"Christina Rossetti has come to the wrong place: there is no answer. In order to while away the time, she will write poems which stage her one Passion for God, with whom she has fallen head over heels in love, more than with life itself, since she repulses men, whom she finds inadequate, in a Victorian society which yet allotted them pride of place, unwitting though it was of women, who were deemed redundant. These serial elegies chiselled by a bashful lover hence draw the graph of her desire to be possessed by a missing one, whose fullnes she extols whilst dreading his potency. The horror of their ultimate encounter is lessened thereof, through the daily disclosures of her mystical climax, which is being dutifully registered as if it were a confession of powerlessness. However unassuming she then appears to be, such moments of great feeling are her delightful way of atoning for her sins.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72593599","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 Church-Builder et The Chapel-Organist : l'écriture poétique de Thomas Hardy du monologue dramatique au théâtre de la voix","authors":"Laurence Estanove","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5876","url":null,"abstract":"These Hardy poems voice the disillusionment of two passionate yet misunderstood speakers about to commit suicide. The genre of the dramatic monologue is here used by Hardy as a model to explore and expand on. The poems do not follow the traditional narrative and subjective lines of the Victorian genre, but work towards an ironic rewriting of it, as for the two speakers self-assertion relies on literal self-dramatisation, and paradoxically involves self-destruction. Through a series of embedded effects, Hardy's dramatic monologues thus become « theatres of the voice » (Henri Meschonnic), showing that Hardy's poetry truly signals the transition from Victorian literature to Modernism.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88178593","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":"'Exotic eroticism': Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda","authors":"J. Kuehn","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5837","url":null,"abstract":"The essay looks once more at the relationship between the two protagonists of George Eliot's final novel. It argues that rather than through issues of class, as scholars have conventionally argued, Gwendolen Harleth's interest in Daniel Deronda must be understood through the ethnic otherness he represents. He is, as the first chapter construes it so unmistakably, 'different' from the men this young Englishwoman normally socialises with, and the enquiry into Deronda's origins and heritage is pursued alongside questions of his 8 perceived 'un-Englishness'. The essay introduces the paradigm of \"the exotic erotic\"―adapted from Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter―to explore Gwendolen Harleth's simultaneous racialising and sexualising of Daniel Deronda. A brief overview of recent postcolonial reassessments of the concept of \"exoticism\", and of Butler's reinterpretation into the context of gender studies, precedes the close reading of the literary text.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79515810","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":"Entre poésie et fiction: Tess ou l'écriture syncopée de Thomas Hardy","authors":"C. Lanone","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5885","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Hardy's poems and novels are closely intertwined through a system of echoes, which suggests that rather than two entirely different modes of writing, they are deeply connected in the writer's mind and reflect a similar quest for meaning through disruption rather than euphonious perfection. This paper addresses a few instances of duplication, focusing mostly on the character of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and on the sense of rupture which Hardy seeks to explore by throwing his reader off-balance. Catherine Clement's book on the philosophy of rapture is used to highlight Hardy's use of syncopation. In poems like Tess's Lament or Beyond the Last Lamp, Hardy probes into the traumatic shift from before to after, the haunting faultline which may be revisited over and over again but never eradicated, corresponding to the fragmented perception of Tess's confession to Angel, which instantly severs the lovers instead of uniting them. Stylistic mishaps such as omissions or punctuations become symptoms through which affect may seep into the text, be it a novel or a poem.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73612852","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":"« Moments of Vision » : l'écriture de Thomas Hardy","authors":"Stéphanie Bernard","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5862","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of his career as a novelist, Hardy wrote dark stories, tragedies. The equivocal quality of these works can also be found in the poems : dealing with the loss of his wife Emma, the writer hesitates between the hope to find her again and the recognition of the inevitable failure of his quest, between the illusion of a second chance and the harsh acknowledgment of facts. The texts come close to evoking hallucinations. The visual quality of things is put into relief by Hardy's art. At the same time, the one who watches often loses himself or herself in the act of watching, by being absorbed into the object of his or her gaze. This object, often a woman, matters less for what it really is than for its power to attract and fix the gaze of the subject. What takes place in scenes like the beginning of The Return of the Native or the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is what Hardy called « moments of vision » in one of his poems. As the observer (usually a man) is seized by the object of his gaze, the visual screen that hides what is beneath the surface dissolves and a new mode of writing emerges. Poetic writing rises when words are unable to express the writer's meaning and when what is to be told is unspeakable, as it is the case with Tess's death or Jude's agony. Approaching the dark core of things with his obscure characters, Hardy eventually abandoned the novel and chose poetry. In his poems, he went on exploring the limbos of life, death and loss while shaping words into lyrical veils shading an unbearable truth.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88085178","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 poétique de la pierre dans l'oeuvre de Thomas Hardy: du livre de pierre au livre de vie","authors":"A. Escuret","doi":"10.4000/CVE.5871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.5871","url":null,"abstract":"Stones are everywhere to be found in Hardy's works. His father worked as a stonemason and Hardy himself trained as an architect. The years that he spent in London moving churchyards for the railway and restoring churches made a painful impression on him. Back in Dorset, he was confronted with the Neolithic monuments of Stonehenge and other pagan monuments such as the tumuli on Egdon Heath and other landmarks. Hardy knew all about archaeology and all about the religious aspects of the past. In other words, through the plight of characters such as Eustacia, Tess or Jude, we are always reminded about past customs such as the bonfires on the hills which recall druidic and Saxon times. Tess's tragedy is summed up by a series of stones (including the pillar of stone \"Cross-in-Hand\" on which is carved a human hand) and the same applies to Jude's fate (with the milestone on which he carves his name). Most characters are alienated by their education and their tragedy comes from the fact that their own time never comes! Tess feels \"at home\" only at the end, on the warm slab at Stonehenge, because the pagan tomb is the only place where she can find rest and sleep. In a word, Hardy uses stones to build up his own distinction between the figurative (which refers to the classical, mimetic aesthetic) and the figural (which refers to writing as play), between the Word made flesh (when the relation of meaning to the world is one of transcendence) and when the idea is never made carnally present at all (because a novel is first of all an event of writing). In La Parole muette (1998), Ranciere insists on the paradoxes of literary representation as novels seem to indicate an embodied world that is forever awaiting embodiment, a liminal world which reminds us of Derrida's concept of the \"spectral\". Ranciere's works are helpful because they help us find a way out of the usual barren oppositions between mimetic aesthetics and the postmodern conceptions of representation as he shows us how literature manages to reorganize the relations between past and future communities and between words and things.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81623248","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 peculiar poetical-like murmur : répétition et poéticité dans The Mayoe of Casterbridge","authors":"A. Ramel","doi":"10.4000/cve.5893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.5893","url":null,"abstract":"This paper tries to explore the poetic dimension of Hardy's prose, by showing how the poetic voice proceeds from various voices that are heard in the diegesis. For a prose text to become poetic, the dimension of automaton must be at work, with the repetition of equivalent units, but the dimension of tuche must also come into play―the encounter with an unsymbolizable Real. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, it is the signifier \"ring\" which commemorates the traumatic moment when Henchard sold his wife on a fair (when she flung her wedding-ring in his face), a punctum effect (in the acoustic field) whose recurrence punctuates the text and produces all sorts of reverberations―repeated letters, alliterations, acoustic debris and fragments―whereby something of the \"voice qua object\" is overheard. Once Henchard is fallen, his roaring voice is heard no more, but he lends an ear to the \"voice of desolation\", the inhuman voice of the river which invites him to take his own life, while Lucetta is killed by the destructive voice of the \"skimmity-ride\". The tragic characters are \"riveted to the matter\" (to Das Ding), but the poetic voice is pacifying because it brings about that flicker of meaning which makes it impossible to take language literally. It puts a bar between words and things, and thus prohibits tragic jouissance.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78290865","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":"Science behind the blinds : Scientist and society in The Invisible Man","authors":"S. Mclean","doi":"10.1057/9780230236639_4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236639_4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75800726","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":"Petits poèmes en prose : la forme poétique dans Tess of the d'Ubervilles","authors":"Isabelle Gadoin","doi":"10.4000/cve.5880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.5880","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Hardywas often reproached―notably by his contemporaries―for the defects and lack of polish and elegance of his written style. Starting from this criticism, this paper analyses the major characteristics of Hardy's style, showing its radical―and fertile―discontinuity. Alongside with awkward passages when the narrator launches into abstract meditations against morals, society or fate, other moments can be found in his novels when the author briefly seems to forsake any concern for realistic description, and to suggest instead enchanted instants of communion between his characters and the world of nature, which transfigure the whole of perception. These are the moments when the poet is revealed within the novel―writer―a poet intent on seizing and rendering what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called \"the prose of the world\". Using both phenomenology and close-readings of the text, this paper tries to show the major characteristics of Hardy's idiosyncratic voice, which is also distinctly heard in his poetry.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84738710","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}