Hatred and Civility – The Antisocial life in Victorian England
Author(s): Christopher Lane (Author)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 23 Jan. 2004
Language: English
Print length: 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0231130643
ISBN-13: 9780231130646
Book Description
This lively, accessible account of works by Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy – once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society’s excesses – turned immoral and quasi-criminal. Delivering a surprising new perspective on the past, Christopher Lane shows that the fanatics troubling us today share many qualities with our supposedly moral ancestors.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A valuable and engaging book. — Stephanie Cross, Times Literary Supplement
An impressive successor…[that] mark[s] him out…as the most renowned psychoanalytic critic in his generation of Victorianists. —
John Plotz, Victorian Studies
Hatred and Civility . . . contains all of my heroes, and I devoured it with the utmost pleasure. —
Florence King,
Lane achieves a remarkable recasting of the Victorian age… A major contribution to Victorian studies. —
Nicola Bradbury, Modern Language Review
Provocative and convincing, [Lane’s thesis is] amply demonstrated through the breadth of his analysis and the strength of his readings. —
Tanya Agathocleous, The Journal of British Studies
From the Inside Flap
In his brilliant new book, Christopher Lane examines representations of an intractably anticommunitarian hatred in Victorian literature. Going far beyond familiar accounts of complexities and duplicities in the ethical and sexual ideals of Victorian culture, Lane discovers in the works of great writers of the period–notably Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning–affects of rage and hate that exceed all narrative control. With impeccable scholarship and admirable clarity, he gives us an often harrowing portrait of these writers’ fascination with drives that are irreducible to psychological explanations–drives of self-extinction and of motiveless rage at the happiness of others. This is a major work of cultural criticism.–Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption
From the Back Cover
The invention of the idea of civility acknowledges the scope of hatred. What Lane has to tell us about the Victorians–our cartoon philanthropists–in this wonderfully cunning and lucid book is that hearing the voices of hatred in nineteenth-century literature is key to understanding the contentions and hedonisms, the pieties and principles of their society, which is so like our own. Hatred and Civility puts us more closely in touch with the wilder energies of a culture.–Adam Phillips, author of Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories
About the Author
Christopher Lane is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity and the editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998).
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