![]() | Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; National characteristics British in literature; Alienation (Social psychology) in literature; Difference (Psychology) in literature; Social isolation in literature; Outsiders in literature; Cultu; This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects. James Buzard teaches Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture," 1800-1918 , as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture. He is also coeditor of a forthcoming collection of essays entitled Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace . |
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