Semi-Detached
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€46.99
A01=John Plotz
Aesthetics
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Author_John Plotz
Autobiography
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Awareness
Brandeis
Brandeis University
Buster Keaton
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AB
Category=DSK
Category=HPN
Category=QDTN
Charles Dickens
Christ in the House of His Parents
Consciousness
COP=United States
Criticism
Daniel Deronda
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Dichotomy
Dubliners
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Feeling
Fiction
Fictional universe
Flatland
Ford Madox Ford
Franco Moretti
Genre
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Hannah Arendt
Invisible Man
Irony
John Everett Millais
John Stuart Mill
Language_English
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lecture
Literary criticism
Literary modernism
Literary realism
Literature
Lyric poetry
Marcel Proust
Melodrama
Modernism
Narrative
Novel
Novelist
On Liberty
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Poetry
Porkpie (TV series)
Potentiality and actuality
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Prose
Protagonist
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Raymond Williams
Romanticism
Science fiction
Scientific romance
Sensibility
Sherlock Jr.
Short story
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Speculative fiction
Storytelling
Subjectivity
Suspension of disbelief
Technology
The Other Hand
The Sense of the Past
The Various
Theophrastus
Thomas Carlyle
Thought
Uncertainty
Victorian literature
Willa Cather
Woolf
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691159461
- Weight: 709g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Nov 2017
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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When you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? Semi-Detached delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics. The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience. The book begins with the decline of the romantic tale, the rise of realism, and John Stuart Mill's ideas about social interaction and subjective perception. Plotz examines Pre-Raphaelite paintings that take semi-detached states of attention as their subject and novels that treat provincial subjects as simultaneously peripheral and central.
He discusses how realist writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James show how consciousness can be in more than one place at a time; how the work of William Morris demonstrates the shifting forms of semi-detachment in print and visual media; and how Willa Cather created a form of modernism that connected aesthetic dreaming and reality. Plotz concludes with a look at early cinema and the works of Buster Keaton, who found remarkable ways to portray semi-detachment on screen. In a time of cyberdependency and virtual worlds, when it seems that attention to everyday reality is stretching thin, Semi-Detached takes a historical and critical look at the halfway-thereness that audiences have long comprehended and embraced in their aesthetic encounters.
John Plotz is professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University. His books include The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton), and a young-adult novel, Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure. Plotz is the editor of the B-Sides series at Public Books.
