Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
Jun 2012 · Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Book 80 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
309
Pages
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About this ebook
Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.
About the author
Jan-Melissa Schramm is a Fellow in English at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge and an affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian literature. She worked as a lawyer before undertaking doctoral research in English. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge, 2000), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on representations of the law in the works of Dickens and Eliot, Victorian satire and first-person narration.
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