1,720,984 research outputs found
A critical examination of three Jane Austen fragments and their bearing on her completed novels
Get PDFWhereas the novels have been exhaustively treated, Jane Austen's fragments have suffered neglect. My thesis aims to help remedy this lack of critical emphasis. I examine three pieces from the early, middle and late periods of her life - Catherine or the Bower (1792), The Watsons (1804) and Sanditon (1817). By showing that Northanger Abbey was neither her first attempt at fiction nor Persuasion her last, I argue that a study of these fragments deepens our insight into her creative processes, showing some unexpected shifts of tone and emphasis not immediately apparent in the completed novels. Chapter I discusses the importance of Catherine or the Bower as an early essay in serious fiction, revealing an interest in certain themes, narrative devices and moral imperatives more subtly developed in her mature works. As the most accomplished of the juvenilia, it shows a move away from the epistolary mode and simple parody of Sentimental excesses towards an exploration of realistic social and economic conditions. I have examined this evolution of form and moral stance in her work, along with her use of spatial detail, and her thematic emphasis on meditation, the abuse of power and the efficacy of proper education. Chapter II considers The Watsons as another decisive point in her development as an artist. Grave in tone, the piece locates the heroine in circumstances harsher than those presented in the fiction hitherto. To stress the pain of poverty, loneliness and the prospect of spinsterhood, Jane Austen had to develop new techniques for conveying the thoughts and feelings of a heroine returning to uncongenial home life. Comedy is underplayed to give scope to a celebration of tranquillity and modesty that looks ahead to Mansfield Park, as does the concern with clerical duty. Chapter III focuses upon Sanditon. Coming after the tenderness of Persuasion, this fragment is disconcertingly robust. In its use of caricature, the device of mistaken identity and. mockery of unchecked imagination, it seems like a return to the juvenilia, but new artistic directions are clearly evident. Playing with motifs of speculation, novelty, hypochondria and uncontrolled energy (mental, physical and verbal), Jane Austen condemns the powerful forces of change that threaten traditional life and values. She is less concerned with tracing complex sentiment than with giving prominence to topographical details that stress the impact of change. The study has been conducted in terms of close analysis of passages stressing various thematic and technical concerns, with cross reference to the complete novels where this has seemed pertinent
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Felix Holt: The Radical and the Gusset of Cryptic Futurity
Get PDFMost Victorian novels avail themselves of tidying codas in which the author projects the story into a future-turned-present and, counterpointed by wedding bells, maps out as close an approximation to the \u27happily ever after\u27 formula as the constraints of realism will allow. The locus classicus for this procedure occurs at the end of Martin Chuzzlewit:
And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children\u27s hands, thy sister, little Ruth, as light of foot and heart as in old days, sits down beside thee. From the Present, and the Past, with which she is so tenderly entwined in all thy thoughts, thy strain soars onward to the Future. As it resounds within thee and without, the noble music, rolling round ye both, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly parting, and uplifts ye both to Heaven!
George Eliot also avails herself of this standard template at the end of Felix Halt: The Radical, its \u27Epilogue\u27 sketching the future course of her characters\u27 lives through present-tense clauses (,As to the town in which Felix Holt now resides\u272), clauses that catapult the reader from 1833 to the date of composition, thirty-three years on. Futurity here becomes largely notional, its proleptic force bled into the narrative present, and this in turn causes the foregoing narrative to recede in time, investing the novel\u27s closure with a paradoxical sense of retrospection
Notes on Middlemarch and Romola
Get PDFRereading Middlemarch and Romola recently, 1 was struck by some unrecorded musical and literary parallels, none of them substantial enough (or indeed sufficiently interconnected) to be woven into an integrated article, but having, 1 hope, enough intrinsic interest to warrant my presenting them here as so many Casaubonic \u27leavings\u27 that might or might not be incorporated into future work on the author.
A Schubertian Moment in Middlemarch
George Eliot\u27s enthusiasm for the Lieder of Schubert is attested by a letter written in October, 1859 - \u27Schubert\u27s songs, 1 especially delight in\u27 (Letters, Ill: 178) - and our knowledge of that fact allows a partially concealed allusion to surface in Middlemarch. The \u27sound track\u27 for the meeting of Lydgate and Casaubon shortly before his death comprises \u27the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge\u27 (Ch. 42, 459) - an idea picked up and developed at the point where the clergyman is forced to contemplate his mortality as an immediate rather than a theoretical fact:
When the commonplace \u27We must all die\u27 transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness \u27I must die - and soon\u27, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. (461- 62
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Leigh Hunt and the poetry of fancy
No full textLeigh Hunt has long been stigmatized as Keats's evil genius, a superficial and mannered poet whose influence can be observed in such early poems as I Stood Tip-Toe and Sleep and Poetry. His portrayal as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House has also fostered an impression of triviality and selfishness in the minds of those who do not trouble to read him. Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy, so far the only book devoted exclusively to his verse, takes issue with these received opinions and argues that, overshadowed by the work of his more gifted contemporaries, Hunt's output has suffered repeatedly from invidious comparisons. Author Rodney Stenning Edgecombe suggests that we need to bring his admittedly minor poetry out of the shadows and, approaching it on its own sunny terms, find a way of enjoying its slightness and delicate charm. With this in mind, Edgecombe urges that we approach the poet as a rococo artist, using this aesthetic category to legitimize and focus the decorative impulse that informs his vision, and the escapism that sometimes led him, as a poet, to skirt many of the issues he so bravely fought for through his Radical journalism. Like Wordsworth, Hunt divided his output into loose generic categories when he began preparing a select edition of his poetry toward the end of his life, categories retained and amplified by H. S. Milford in his 1923 edition. Edgecombe has used these divisions as a way of organizing his study, and also of illustrating the immense range of forms and genres that the poet explored in the course of a long career. He furthermore offers close readings of many seminal poems in an effort to show that Hunt, dismissed by Carlyle as a sort of poetic "tinker," was a generally creditable craftsperson, and that when the occasion inspired him, he could write very well indeed
- …
