Overview
Explores Meredith’s hostility towards biography and his attempts to obscure his personal life
Traces a late-nineteenth-century turn toward writing influenced by other novels rather than experience
Expands understanding of style and prose of an often-ignored author
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (8 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith’s novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote—arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith’s novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith’s personal side—including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages—as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Richard Cronin is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. His most recent books are Romantic Victorians English Literature, 1824-1840 (2001); Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (2010); and Reading Victorian Poetry (2011).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: George Meredith
Book Subtitle: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist
Authors: Richard Cronin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32448-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-32447-6Published: 09 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-32450-6Published: 09 December 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-32448-3Published: 23 November 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 294
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Fiction, British and Irish Literature, Literary History, History of Britain and Ireland