Name: Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative By Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)
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Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Summary

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative by Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

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.

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Reviews

'Schramm's work is a significant work for Victorian scholars and all who wish to understand more clearly the political, legal and theological ferment of the nineteenth century and how that is reflected in attitudes to sacrifice and substitution in the Victorian novel.' Peter Stiles, The Glass

About Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Jan-Melissa Schramm is a Fellow in English at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge and an affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian literature. She worked as a lawyer before undertaking doctoral research in English. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge, 2000), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on representations of the law in the works of Dickens and Eliot, Victorian satire and first-person narration.

Introduction: (unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse; 1. 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people': sympathy and substitution on the scaffold; 2. 'Fortune takes the place of guilt': narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram; 3. 'Standing for' the people: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848; 4. Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute: Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s; 5. Substitution and imposture: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation; Conclusion: innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction.

Additional information

Sku

NLS9781107507609

ISBN 13

9781107507609

ISBN 10

110750760X

Title

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative by Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Author

Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Series

Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Condition

New

Binding type

Paperback

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Year published

2015-03-05

Number of pages

310

Prizes

N/A

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Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative by Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Summary

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Summary

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative by Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Reviews

About Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge)

Table of Contents

Additional information

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