Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America 2017 Edition Contributor(s): Carver, Ben (Author) |
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ISBN: 1137573333 ISBN-13: 9781137573339 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan OUR PRICE: $104.49 Product Type: Hardcover Published: October 2017 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century |
Dewey: 809.034 |
LCCN: 2017937711 |
Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture |
Physical Information: 0.75" H x 5.83" W x 8.27" (1.15 lbs) 292 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and scenarios--referred to here as "alternate histories"--proliferated during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the (nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that "discovered" improved relations between men and women, and the use of alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship between the New World and the Old. The "untimely" imagination of other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. |