Description: Examining works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Morris and John Ruskin, Dentith uses the notion of hindsight to approach issues of interpretation and historicity. It is possible, Dentith argues, to read historical literature with an awareness of the historical context and of the difference between the past and the present while allowing that friction or difference to be part of how we think about a text and how it communicates.
Review Quotes:
'All in all this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging contribution to our continuing critical and creative questions into the twenty-first century as to how we read, write and engage with the Victorians.' - Rosie Miles, The Journal of William Morris Studies
'Simon Dentith's rewarding and critically stimulating book constitutes a major landmark in serious, fresh thinking about the massive issue of how to read literature in time. A remarkable achievement.' - Francis O'Gorman, University of Leeds, UK '
'Dentith's approach is exciting, provocative and rewarding. The potential vastness of the subject is handled elegantly, with each chapter tracing a different aspect of the complex negotiations of Victorian legacies, facilitated by lively analyses of textual content and historicized reception history ... Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now is a rich meditation on a complex subject, brought to life by Simon Dentith's lucid prose and thought-provoking examples. The ramifications for reception studies and literary criticism are significant, and the arguments for the continuing relevance and potency of Victorian literature compelling.' - Times Literary Supplement
'... Simon Dentith's lively new book comes as a welcome resource, one that breaks considerable new ground ...' Review of English Studies
'Dentith's deft management of the cacophony of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century and the intervening chaotic uproar of the twentieth century reveals throughout the text a keen scholastic ear for the lost or silenced voices in each century and an attempt to create a space in which the possibilities they held in the past or hold for the present and future can be heard and read.' - Rocky Mountain Review
'SHARP members should find this book of great interest, demonstrating as it does both erudition about a range of nineteenth-century writers, and a sense of how Victorian culture has inflected the work of recent novelists.' - SHARP News
'... this is an argument for patient understanding against debunking, for authentic hindsight against facile knowledge.' - Key Words