Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 20 | |
Phrenology Physiognomy and Memory in Charlotte Brontė | 76 |
Dickens Thackeray and MidCentury Fictional Autobiography | 125 |
Collins Sensation Forgetting | 167 |
Eliots Romola and Amnesiac Histories | 206 |
Nostalgic Reading | 236 |
Notes | 243 |
Bibliography | 281 |
Index | 293 |
Other editions - View all
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames Limited preview - 2001 |
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames Limited preview - 2001 |
Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 Nicholas Dames No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
amnesia Anne associationism associationist associative Austen’s Austen’s novels aVair aVection Baldassare become Blackwater Park body Brontė’s century characters Charlotte Brontė claim clinical gaze closural Collins Collins’s consciousness continually Crimsworth critics cultural David detail Dickens Dickens’s disconnection diVerent diYcult eighteenth-century Eliot’s Esmond eVect eVort face fact faculty familiar Fanny Fanny’s forgetting function George Eliot Hartright historical novel homesickness idea insofar instance Jane Austen later Laura London Lucy Lucy’s Mansfield Mansfield Park Marianne Marianne’s mental mind mnemonic modern nostalgia narrator nineteenth nineteenth-century nostalgia nostalgic novelist objects Oxford pain past past’s pathological Pen’s perhaps personal memory phrenological physiology pleasure plot present psyche psychology reader reading recall recollection reflex relevant remember retrospect Ribot Romola scene sensation novel sense Sense and Sensibility social souvenirs suVered talgia term text’s Thackeray Thackeray’s theory tion Tito Tito’s trans trauma University Press vague Victorian fiction Villette Woman in White
Popular passages
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Page 69 - I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice.
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Page 69 - I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now.
Page 53 - If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient: at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting...
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Page 72 - The last few hours were certainly very painful," replied Anne; " but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering, which was by no means the case at Lyme. We were only in anxiety and distress during the last two hours, and previously there had been a great deal of enjoyment.
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