Paper 3 Critics

Deborah E. McDowell

Frederick Douglass’ primary purpose was to advance the abolitionist cause rather than tell his life story in detail

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Douglass’ three ‘fictive’ selves in Narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Slavery's time was delineated by memory and memory alone. One's sense of one's existence, therefore, depended upon memory. It was memory, above all else, that gave a shape to being itself.’

Franco Moretti, An Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1999)

‘the great city is truly another world, if compared to the rest of the country - but the narrative will bind it once and for all to the provinces, constructing it as the natural goal of all young men of talent.’

Franco Moretti, An Atlas of the European Novel 1800- 1900 (1999)

‘geography is not an inert container […] but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth.’

Jeaninne DeLombard

Slavery on Trial motif

Sharon Locy

‘Jane moves through the world like a boy’

Sharon Locy

Men move across the map whist women apear as stationary dots

Sharon Locy

Like in other more traditional female bildungsromane, Mr Rochester becomes Jane’s destination

Sharon Locy

Jane’s ending in the remote, secluded Ferndean is an unsatisfactory end

Sandra M. Gilbert

Jane’s adventure away from Thornfield which ends with her refusal of St. John is a ‘pilgrimage towards selfhood’

Fred Botting, Gothic (1996)

The isolated house or mansion - ‘conjunction of family line, social status and physical property’

Fred Botting, Gothic (1996)

‘Power, property and paternal lineage combine in the image of the castle’

Alexandra Warwick, ‘Urban Gothic’

‘The city is seen as uncanny, constructed by people yet unknowable by the individual.’ 

Alexandra Warwick, ‘Urban Gothic’

‘The city is also a place of ruins, paradoxically always new but always decaying’

Roger Luckhurst, Introduction to Jekyll and Hyde

‘One of the most influential aspects of Jekyll and Hyde is the fevered way in which it imagines London. It is a hallucinatory place, never clearly navigable, the streets even in daylight ‘like a district of some city in a nightmare’.’

Roger Luckhurst, Introduction to Jekyll and Hyde

‘This was to have a major influence on the late Victorian Gothic: Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Arthur Machen’s Helen Vaughan, and Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula all bring primitive, marginal, and monstrous into the civilized imperial metropolis.’

Henry James

On marriage of Lydgate and Rosamond: ‘there is nothing more powerfully real than these scenes in all English fiction’ 

Lillian Furst, Realism (1992)

Truth telling as a core realist belief - directness, simplicity and ‘unadorned artlessness’

Martin Hewitt

Victorianism to some extent a generalising myth

Martin Hewitt

Obscenity laws and huge social stigma show a clear generalised belief that art has a moral responsibility to uphold societal values of marriage, family, patriarchy, piety, general good character.

Oscar Wilde, congratulating audience after Lady Windemere’s Fan

I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.