Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Buckmaster, Jonathan

Titel

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2019-06, Vol.36 (2), p.179-182

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between that world and our immediate surroundings. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). [...]after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Plotz's chronological trajectory means that his treatment of Dickens is concentrated in the first chapter, and once Plotz looks beyond "The Inimitable," Semi-Detached becomes a versatile account that charts other "experiments in semi-detachment" (122) and other experiences of this inhabitation of paired worlds. [...]the provincial novels of George Eliot translate the semi-detached experience onto one of physical as well as conceptual geography, whereby "provincial life" becomes desirable "for its capacity to locate its inhabitants at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strongly ephemeral) everywhere" (102).