In Dickens’s Hyperrealism, John R. Reed examines certain features of Dickens’s style to demonstrate that the Inimitable consciously resisted what came to be known as realism in the genre of the novel. Dickens used some techniques associated with realism, such as description and metonymy, to subvert the purposes usually associated with it. Reed argues that Dickens used such devices as personification and present-tense narration, which are anathema to the realist approach. He asserts that Dickens preferred a heightened reality, not realism. And, unlike the realism which seeks to mask authorial control of how readers read his novels, Dickens wanted to demonstrate, first openly, and later in his career more subtly, his command over his narratives. This book opens a new avenue for investigating Dickens’s mastery of his art and his awareness of its literary context. In addition, it reopens the whole issue of realism as a definition and examines the variety of genres that coexisted in the Victorian period.

Dickens’s Hyperrealism

Literature & Fiction

Reed, John R.

British & Irish

Ohio State University Press

Dickens's Hyperrealism

Dickenss Hyperrealism

Mylar protected dustjacket is tattered at edges, rubbed, and price clipped.

Perception and design in Tennyson's Idylls of the king

Ohio University Press

Victorian Conventions

Reed, John Robert

In Decadent Style, John Reed defines “decadent art” broadly enough to encompass literature, music, and the visual arts and precisely enough to examine individual works in detail. Reed focuses on the essential characteristics of this style and distinguishes it from non–esthetic categories of “decadent artists” and “decadent themes.” Like the natural sciences and psychology, the arts in the late nineteenth century reflect an interest in the process of atomization. Literature and the other arts mirror this interest by developing, or rather elaborating, existing forms to the point of what appears to be dissolution. Instead of these forms dissolving, however, they require their audience’s participation and thus involve a new order. Reed argues that this process of reordering characterizes decadent style, which depends upon sensory provocation resolvable only through negation and is therefore bounded by philosophical and emotional assumptions of inevitable frustration. Drawing upon the literature, music, and visual arts of England and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Reed provides a widely ranging and authoritative overview of decadent style, which relates such artists as Huysmans, Wilde, D’Annunzio, Moreau, Bresdin, Klimt, Klinger, Wagner, and Strauss. He related decadent style to Pre–Raphaelite and Naturalist preoccupation with detail and to aesthetic and Symbolist fascination with sensibility and idealism. Ultimately, Reed argues, decadent style is a late stage of Romanticism, overshadowed by Symbolism but anticipating, in its attempt to yoke incompatibilities and to engender a new cerebral form, some of the main traits of Modernism.

Decadent Style

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Review\n“A large encyclopedic study of fifteen conventions of Victorian fiction—including women, marriage, coincidence, the orphan, memory, the occult. The most striking quality of the book is its wide-ranging grasp of all kinds of Victorian materials, for although its announced intention is to treat the conventions of fiction, it makes use of supporting evidence in letters, memoirs, periodicals, illustrations, and other belles lettres…This is an immensely learned, ambitious, and intelligently written book that will probably become a standard and should be in every library.”—Choice\n“A large encyclopedic study of fifteen conventions of Victorian fiction—including women, marriage, coincidence, the orphan, memory, the occult. The most striking quality of the book is its wide-ranging grasp of all kinds of Victorian materials, for although its announced intention is to treat the conventions of fiction, it makes use of supporting evidence in letters, memoirs, periodicals, illustrations, and other belles lettres…This is an immensely learned, ambitious, and intelligently written book that will probably become a standard and should be in every library.” —Choice

John R. Reed, author of Victorian Conventions, The Natural History of H.G. Wells, and Decadent Style, has published a new critical study examining nineteenth-century British attitudes toward free will, determinism, providence, and fate. His new book, Victorian Will, argues for the need to understand a body of literature in its broadest historical and intellectual context. From among a number of different possibilities, Reed chose the concept of will –- whether understood as part of a providential scheme, as an illusory power in a determined existence, or as a free agent in a world of chance –- to illuminate the relationship of literary works of the period. Will was not only a prominent subject of discussion in Victorian England, but attitudes towards will affect form, style, and characterization in contemporary fiction, as Reed demonstrates in his discussion of the works of Mary Shelley, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. Victorian Will is destined to take its place beside Reed’s other work as a standard reference in nineteenth-century study.

Victorian Will

Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness

Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed’s well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Santa Barbara Literary Journal: Volume 9: Space Sirens

Nadis, Fred

Talley, Max

Webb, Silver

Eidt, Jack

De Voe, M. M.

Musicant, Shira

Rodenborn, Michelle

Short Stories & Anthologies

Independently published

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