The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Download or read book The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction written by D. Payne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.