Atonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative

Resource Information

The work Atonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Atonement and self-sacrifice in nineteenth-century narrative

Statement of responsibility

Jan-Melissa Schramm

Creator

• Schramm, Jan-Melissa

Subject

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
• Self in literature
• Self-sacrifice in literature
• Atonement in literature

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another"--

Member of

• Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture, 80

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

823/.809355

Index

index present

LC call number

PR468.S43

LC item number

S37 2012

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture

Series volume

80