The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationBook/Arts/Article review

Abstract

The fleshing-out of physical environment has the power to estrange the familiar, to turn the homely into the unheimlich (Radcliffe), but it can also familiarize that which is historically distant and therefore strange (Scott). [...] by the late 1800s and early 1900s, description - to use the metaphor that Wall borrows from Tom Jones - has been transformed from a "foundling" of dubious standing, "a sort of embarrassing bundle on the literary doorstep" (40), into a gentrified "heir" and can go on to pursue its even more illustrious future in the red rooms of Victorian fiction.
Original languageAmerican English
Pages352-356
Volume7
No2
Specialist publicationPartial Answers: journal of literature and the history of ideas
StatePublished - 2009

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