Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten. |
Contents
Reading Nostalgia | 3 |
CHAPTER 1 Austens Nostalgics | 20 |
Phrenology Physiognomy and Memory in Charlotte Brontë | 76 |
Dickens Thackeray and MidCentury Fictional Autobiography | 125 |
Collins Sensation Forgetting | 167 |
Eliots Romola and Amnesiac Histories | 206 |
Nostalgic Reading | 236 |
Notes | 243 |
| 281 | |
| 293 | |
Other editions - View all
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames Limited preview - 2001 |
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames Limited preview - 2001 |
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
active amnesia Anne associative Austen’s become begins body Brontë’s called century characters claim clinical Collins Collins’s consider continually course critics cultural David detail disconnection early effect eighteenth-century Eliot’s Esmond example experience face fact faculty familiar Fanny feeling fiction figure forgetting function future gaze historical idea important instance interest later leave less London look Lucy means memory mental mind mnemonic narrative nature never nineteenth nineteenth-century nostalgia nostalgic novel objects once organs original Oxford pain particular past perhaps phrenological pleasure plot possible precisely present produce psychology reader reading recall recollection reference relation remember retrospect Romola scene seems seen sensation sense social sort specific term theory thought tion trauma turn University Press vague various Victorian Woman in White writing York