Avrom Fleishman

Fiction and the Ways of Knowing

Essays on British Novels

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture-the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences. The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach-as explained in his introductory essay-are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula. Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence. The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Texas Press
• Seitenzahl: 238
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 1978
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 393g
• ISBN-13: 9780292740884
• ISBN-10: 0292740883
• Artikelnr.: 35053943

Autorenporträt

By Avrom Fleishman

Inhaltsangabe

* Preface
* 1. Introduction: Fiction as Supplement
* 2. The Socialization of Catherine Morland, an application of
anthropological theory to Northanger Abbey
* 3. Wuthering Heights: The Love of a Sylph and a Gnome, an exploration
of alchemical and hermetic lore
* 4. A Napoleon of Heroines: Historical Myth in Vanity Fair, a study of
political imagination
* 5. Master and Servant in Little Dorrit, an analysis derived from
Hegelian social thought
* 6. The Wanderings of Melmotte, an estimate of cultural symbols in
The Way We Live Now
* 7. “Daniel Charisi”, an assessment of Daniel Deronda in the history
of ideas
* 8. The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath, an archeology of folklore in The
Return of the Native
* 9. Speech and Writing in Under Western Eyes, a test case for recent
theories of language
* 10. Science in “Ithaca”, an examination of the physical sciences in
Ulysses
* 11. Being and Nothing in A Passage to India, a meditation on its
religious structure
* 12. Woolf and McTaggart, an interrogation of the metaphysics in To
the Lighthouse
* 13. The Magus of the Wizard of the West, a tracing of myth and ritual
patterns
* Postscript
* Notes