The Dominant Structures of the Times: Late Victorian Tragedy as Critique of Romantic Ideology | ||||
| مجلة کلية الآداب جامعة الفيوم | ||||
| Article 23, Volume 15, Issue 1, January 2023, Page 851-911 PDF (748.34 K) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jfafu.2023.184336.1853 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Amr Elsherif 
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| کلية الآداب - جامعة دمنهور | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers and thinkers formulated a worldview which recreated the theological unity of being on the level of immanence. This intellectual unity was imposed on the deeply divided Victorian society which was described by Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, as “the two nations.” Imposing a unified intellectual framework on a sharply divided society without being able to develop it from within is bound to merely cover the division with an ideological smokescreen. This study explores how romantic ideology manifests itself in the dominant form of romantic realism in the fiction of early Victorian writers. It, then, investigates the dominant form of late Victorian fiction in order to prove that it functions as ideology critique. Romantic fiction attempts to unify the individual and society, man and nature and the different social classes through showing how they are permeated by a unifying spirit. The form of late Victorian tragedy which shows the opposition between the individual and society, man and nature and the social classes is the result of debunking the faith in unity as merely ideological. When unity is merely ideological, what remains is the mere opposition in which the individual is defeated creating, thereby, the distinctive form of tragedy. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Ideology critique; Naïve and sentimental literature; Sociology of Knowledge; Victorian Fiction; Tragedy | ||||
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