Book Description
Focusing on the social discourses in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Rene Mauperin, particularly the dialogic exchanges of the drawing-room, this study offers significant insights into the usefulness of Bakhtinian theory. It reveals how the various levels of discourse operate in the texts and, consequently, how they relate to their social contexts determined by well-defined gender demarcations within the bourgeois ideological paradigm. The drawing-room of the nineteenth century provides a lively forum for society to voice its ideals and expectations. This study examines those ideals and their limitations, the social discourses of the texts as they operate in the chronotope of the drawing-room, and the extent to which these narratives undermine social expectations.
The Conflicting Discourses of the Drawing-Room: Anthony Trollope and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt FROM THE PUBLISHER
Focusing on the social discourses in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Renee Mauperin, particularly the dialogic exchanges of the drawing-room, this study offers significant insights into the usefulness of Bakhtinian theory. It reveals how the various levels of discourse operate in the texts and, consequently, how they relate to their social contexts determined by well-defined gender demarcations within the bourgeois ideological paradigm. The drawing-room of the nineteenth century provides a lively forum for society to voice its ideals and expectations. This study examines those ideals and their limitations, the social discourses of the texts as they operate in the chronotope of the drawing-room, and the extent to which these narratives undermine social expectations.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Heil (English and Spanish, U. of the Ozarks) investigates the ways in
which society is presented in Anthony Trollope's "Barchester
Towers" and Edmond and Jules de Goncourts' "Rene Mauperin". In
particular, she shows the manner in which the various social
discourses are distributed and how they function in the interrelation
of the characters and the ideological positions of the characters as
members of bourgeois societies. The focus on the drawing-room as a
crucial chronotope of the era limits the scope of the study to
domestic, social, and familial contexts.
Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Art & Photography
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