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Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Scenes of Sympathy

Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

by (author) Audrey Jaffe

Publisher
Cornell University Press, MacMillan Co.
Initial publish date
Aug 2018
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Social Classes
Recommended Age
18
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781501719899
    Publish Date
    Aug 2018
    List Price
    $26.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780801437120
    Publish Date
    Mar 2000
    List Price
    $76.95

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Description

In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

About the author

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph and Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience.

Audrey Jaffe's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Jaffe's second book provides thorough and sophisticated readings. She draws her methodological apparatus from psychoanalytic and cinematic theory, which she handles with originality and flair. Scenes of Sympathy is a welcome addition to discussions of contemporary identity politics.

Choice

Scenes of Sympathy is especially rich in its demonstration of the remarkable range of preoccupations, Victorian and current, which find their underpinning in sympathy.

Victorian Studies