Description
To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites, murderers, and cheats of all types abound.
Christopher Lane's urbane and nuanced study of that most anomalous yet central figure-the good Victorian hater-restores to us the shadowy other of the age's much-vaunted ethic of sympathy. Hatred and Civility is a dramatic and timely advance in our understanding of Victorian sociability. -- Nicholas Dames, Columbia University The invention of the idea of civility acknowledges the scope of hatred. What Lane has to tell us about the Victorians-our cartoon philanthropists-in this wonderfully cunning and lucid book is that hearing the voices of hatred in nineteenth-century literature is key to understanding the contentions and hedonisms, the pieties and principles of their society, which is so like our own. Hatred and Civility puts us more closely in touch with the wilder energies of a culture. -- Adam Phillips, author of Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories In his brilliant new book, Christopher Lane examines representations of an intractably anticommunitarian hatred in Victorian literature. Going far beyond familiar accounts of complexities and duplicities in the ethical and sexual ideals of Victorian culture, Lane discovers in the works of great writers of the period-notably Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning-affects of rage and hate that exceed all narrative control. With impeccable scholarship and admirable clarity, he gives us an often harrowing portrait of these writers' fascination with drives that are irreducible to psychological explanations-drives of self-extinction and of motiveless rage at the happiness of others. This is a major work of cultural criticism. -- Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption Hatred and Civility... contains all of my heroes, and I devoured it with the utmost pleasure. -- Florence King, The Misanthrope's Corner and author of With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy
About the Author
Christopher Lane is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity and the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998).
Reviews
Will be welcome in all collections of Victorian literature...Highly recommended. -- P. W. Stine Choice Lane's study succeeds in prompting readers to confront a deep, simple, and problematic truth: that it is no small feat to live successfully among people. -- Ilana M. Blumberg Nineteenth-Century Literature An impressive successor... [that] mark[s] him out...as the most renowned psychoanalytic critic in his generation of Victorianists. -- John Plotz Victorian Studies Lane's vision of the period as one rife with antisocial sentiment is provocative and convincing, and amply demonstrated through the breadth of his analysis and the strength of his readings. -- Tanya Agathocleous Journal of British Studies A valuable and engaging book. -- Stephanie Cross Times Literary Supplement Lane achieves a remarkable recasting of the Victorian age, revealing a pervasive Victorian 'willingness to let hatred and civility collide in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion.' His range of reference is impressive... [This book] is a major contribution to Victorian studies. -- Nicola Bradbury Modern Language Review [Lane] convincingly shows that the aesthetic and moral premises of Victorian literature are powerfully undermined by a constantly resurfacing belief that hatred and malice are more potent ontological imperatives in human nature than are love and sympathy." -- David G. Riede, author of Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry Lane's excellent book [provides] fascinating close readings while always keeping the bigger picture--the relationship between the individual and society--in full view. -- Caroline Reitz, author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, 1788-1927
Book Information
ISBN 9780231130653
Author Christopher Lane
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
Christopher Lane's urbane and nuanced study of that most anomalous yet central figure-the good Victorian hater-restores to us the shadowy other of the age's much-vaunted ethic of sympathy. Hatred and Civility is a dramatic and timely advance in our understanding of Victorian sociability. -- Nicholas Dames, Columbia University The invention of the idea of civility acknowledges the scope of hatred. What Lane has to tell us about the Victorians-our cartoon philanthropists-in this wonderfully cunning and lucid book is that hearing the voices of hatred in nineteenth-century literature is key to understanding the contentions and hedonisms, the pieties and principles of their society, which is so like our own. Hatred and Civility puts us more closely in touch with the wilder energies of a culture. -- Adam Phillips, author of Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories In his brilliant new book, Christopher Lane examines representations of an intractably anticommunitarian hatred in Victorian literature. Going far beyond familiar accounts of complexities and duplicities in the ethical and sexual ideals of Victorian culture, Lane discovers in the works of great writers of the period-notably Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning-affects of rage and hate that exceed all narrative control. With impeccable scholarship and admirable clarity, he gives us an often harrowing portrait of these writers' fascination with drives that are irreducible to psychological explanations-drives of self-extinction and of motiveless rage at the happiness of others. This is a major work of cultural criticism. -- Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption Hatred and Civility... contains all of my heroes, and I devoured it with the utmost pleasure. -- Florence King, The Misanthrope's Corner and author of With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy
About the Author
Christopher Lane is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity and the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998).
Reviews
Will be welcome in all collections of Victorian literature...Highly recommended. -- P. W. Stine Choice Lane's study succeeds in prompting readers to confront a deep, simple, and problematic truth: that it is no small feat to live successfully among people. -- Ilana M. Blumberg Nineteenth-Century Literature An impressive successor... [that] mark[s] him out...as the most renowned psychoanalytic critic in his generation of Victorianists. -- John Plotz Victorian Studies Lane's vision of the period as one rife with antisocial sentiment is provocative and convincing, and amply demonstrated through the breadth of his analysis and the strength of his readings. -- Tanya Agathocleous Journal of British Studies A valuable and engaging book. -- Stephanie Cross Times Literary Supplement Lane achieves a remarkable recasting of the Victorian age, revealing a pervasive Victorian 'willingness to let hatred and civility collide in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion.' His range of reference is impressive... [This book] is a major contribution to Victorian studies. -- Nicola Bradbury Modern Language Review [Lane] convincingly shows that the aesthetic and moral premises of Victorian literature are powerfully undermined by a constantly resurfacing belief that hatred and malice are more potent ontological imperatives in human nature than are love and sympathy." -- David G. Riede, author of Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry Lane's excellent book [provides] fascinating close readings while always keeping the bigger picture--the relationship between the individual and society--in full view. -- Caroline Reitz, author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, 1788-1927
Book Information
ISBN 9780231130653
Author Christopher Lane
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
