A01=James Buzard
Absurdity
Allegory
Allusion
Alterity
Anomie
Austen
Author_James Buzard
Autoethnography
Benedict Anderson
Bildungsroman
Bleak House
Britishness
Cambridge University Press
Career
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Category=DSK
Colonialism
Cornell University Press
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
Cultural identity
Culture and Anarchy
Culture and Imperialism
Daniel Deronda
Despotism
Determination
Edward Said
En route (novel)
English novel
English people
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Ethnocentrism
Ethnography
Evocation
Exclusion
Fiction
George Eliot
Historical fiction
Hyperbole
Indulgence
Jane Eyre
John Stuart Mill
Literature
Marriage plot
Modernity
Mr.
Mrs.
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Narrative
Nationality
News from Nowhere
Novel
Novelist
Oxford University Press
Parody
Participant observation
Pity
Poetry
Princeton University Press
Protestantism
Raymond Williams
Romanticism
Routledge
Skepticism
Superiority (short story)
Symptom
The Other Hand
The True-Born Englishman
Thick description
Tourism
University of California Press
Villette (novel)
Walter Benn Michaels
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691095554
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 03 Apr 2005
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. Disorienting Fiction shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and, most influentially, by Walter Scott.
Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being.
Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.
James Buzard teaches Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of "The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture," 1800-1918", as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture. He is also coeditor of a forthcoming collection of essays entitled "Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace".
