Jerome Meckier's Books

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

By: Jerome Meckier

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Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

By: Jerome Meckier

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's—usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens—determined to remain inimitable—replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

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324

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University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813159598

ISBN 13

9780813159591

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

By: Jerome Meckier

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Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

By: Jerome Meckier

Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)

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393

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LIT Verlag Münster

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ISBN 10

3643901011

ISBN 13

9783643901019

Dickens's Great Expectations

Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

By: Jerome Meckier

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Dickens's Great Expectations

Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

By: Jerome Meckier

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

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409

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University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813185289

ISBN 13

9780813185286

Innocent Abroad

Charles Dickens's American Engagements

By: Jerome Meckier

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Innocent Abroad

Charles Dickens's American Engagements

By: Jerome Meckier

In 1842, Victorian England's foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first. Using new materials—letters, diaries, and publishers' records—Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens's American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew less equalitarian and more British daily, a disillusioned novelist discovering his true self. His American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) repudiated travel books by Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Martineau that had either viewed America as civilization's new dawn or voiced insufficient reservations. Having plumbed man's tainted hear abroad, the creator of Mr. Pickwick saw everything more satirically at home: he became a radical pessimist, a dedicated reformer who nevertheless ruled out a utopian future. Dickens's return visit, the reading tour intended to make his fortune, was an ironic second coming. Thanks to poor planning and management, ticket scalpers benefited as greatly as the much-lionized performer. Meckier argues that Dickens's business dealings with his American publishers were neither as smooth nor as lucrative as legend holds, but that the novelist's health problems and his eagerness to bring along his mistress have been much exaggerated. In fascinating counterpoint, Meckier charts the ticket speculators' systematic successes, the ups and downs of Dickens's catarrh, and the steady inroads he made into the heart of Annie Fields, his American publisher's young wife. This critical/biographical study reshapes our view of the life and career of the giant of Victorian Literatures.

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412

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813194865

ISBN 13

9780813194868

Dickens's Great Expectations

Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

By: Jerome Meckier

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Dickens's Great Expectations

Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

By: Jerome Meckier

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409

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813185289

ISBN 13

9780813185286

Innocent Abroad

Charles Dickens's American Engagements

By: Jerome Meckier

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Innocent Abroad

Charles Dickens's American Engagements

By: Jerome Meckier

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412

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University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813194865

ISBN 13

9780813194868

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

By: Jerome Meckier

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Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

By: Jerome Meckier

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445

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University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813185432

ISBN 13

9780813185439

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

By: Jerome Meckier

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Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

By: Jerome Meckier

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393

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LIT Verlag Münster

Published Date

ISBN 10

3643901011

ISBN 13

9783643901019

Aldous Huxley Annual

By: Bernfried Nugel,Jerome Meckier

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Aldous Huxley Annual

By: Bernfried Nugel,Jerome Meckier

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. It publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. This issue features Aldous Huxley's and Beth Wendel's dramatization of The Genius and the Goddess never before published. It also includes several rather unknown travel essays by Aldous Huxley as well as Peter E. Firchow's opening lecture at the Third International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Riga in July 2004.

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238

Publisher

LIT Verlag Münster

Published Date

ISBN 10

3825882721

ISBN 13

9783825882723

Aldous Huxley Annual

A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond

By: Jerome Meckier,Bernfried Nugel

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Aldous Huxley Annual

A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond

By: Jerome Meckier,Bernfried Nugel

This and the next Annual feature a collection of Aldous Huxley's early essays in art criticism, for the most part published anonymously. The present issue focuses on Huxley's critical approach to painting, particularly to Modernist works (Part I); The forthcoming Annual will concentrate on Huxley's appraisal of architecture, applied arts and sculpture in the 1920s (Part II). Bernfried Nugel is head of the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies at the English Seminar of the University of Muenster (Germany). Jerome Meckier is a researcher at the University of Kentucky and at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies at the English Seminar of the University of Muenster.

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244

Publisher

LIT Verlag Münster

Published Date

ISBN 10

3825892921

ISBN 13

9783825892920

Aldous Huxley Annual

Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond

By: Jerome Meckier,Bernfried Nugel

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Aldous Huxley Annual

Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond

By: Jerome Meckier,Bernfried Nugel

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252

Publisher

Mohr Siebeck

Published Date

ISBN 10

382584370X

ISBN 13

9783825843700

Aldous Huxley Annual

Volume 19 (2019)

By: Jerome Meckier

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Aldous Huxley Annual

Volume 19 (2019)

By: Jerome Meckier

Volume 19 is dedicated to the memory of Prof Lothar Fietz (University of Tübingen) in appreciation of his merits as an outstanding Huxley scholar, as a Founding Member and Curator of the Aldous Huxley Society and as a true friend (see the In Memoriam above). The volume opens with a sequence of hitherto unpublished Huxley writings, starting with the three extant versions from 1949 of his dramatization of Ape and Essence (1948), thematically linked with two texts treating the physical survival of mankind and three contrasting texts discussing the question of spiritual survival. This section is followed by Huxley's draft for an introduction of Edna St. Vincent Millay at one of her poetry readings in 1938 and an autograph letter to Seabury Edwardes that he wrote shortly after the publication of The Doors of Perception (1954). The volume closes with several critical articles on Huxley's relationship with D. T. Suzuki, his Sanary period and his view and practice of literary utopias.

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Page Count

302

Publisher

LIT Verlag Münster

Published Date

ISBN 10

3643912501

ISBN 13

9783643912503

Book's by Jerome Meckier

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Dickens's Great Expectations

Dickens's Great Expectations

Innocent Abroad

Innocent Abroad

Dickens's Great Expectations

Dickens's Great Expectations

Innocent Abroad

Innocent Abroad

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

Aldous Huxley Annual

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