The book explores the modernity of Wilkie Collins’s oeuvre in relation to Victorian culture and epistemology. By drawing on current theories developed by philosophers and cultural critics (Foucault, Bauman, Bhabha, Blumenberg, etc.), Mariaconcetta Costantini demonstrates that Collins was enthralled by nineteenth-century notions of relativism which paved the way to the radical thinking of the twentieth century. His awareness of the ‘fluidity’ of experience and identity was given fictional shape in his writing, whose philosophical complexity poses a stimulating hermeneutical challenge for Collins scholars and Victorianists. Starting from these premises, Costantini analyzes the liquid tropes of numerous Collins works, which are shown to convey a relativistic view of existence. The first part of the book, focusing on metaphors of navigation, gives evidence of the novelist’s reworking of the traditional genre of sea narrative, through which he came to express the sense of being cast adrift in the world. The fluidification of identity is, instead, examined in the second part of the volume, which offers multiple examples of Collins’s reconfiguration of racial, gender and disability models.
Venturing into Unknown Waters: Wilkie Collins and the Challenge of Modernity
COSTANTINI, Mariaconcetta
2008-01-01
Abstract
The book explores the modernity of Wilkie Collins’s oeuvre in relation to Victorian culture and epistemology. By drawing on current theories developed by philosophers and cultural critics (Foucault, Bauman, Bhabha, Blumenberg, etc.), Mariaconcetta Costantini demonstrates that Collins was enthralled by nineteenth-century notions of relativism which paved the way to the radical thinking of the twentieth century. His awareness of the ‘fluidity’ of experience and identity was given fictional shape in his writing, whose philosophical complexity poses a stimulating hermeneutical challenge for Collins scholars and Victorianists. Starting from these premises, Costantini analyzes the liquid tropes of numerous Collins works, which are shown to convey a relativistic view of existence. The first part of the book, focusing on metaphors of navigation, gives evidence of the novelist’s reworking of the traditional genre of sea narrative, through which he came to express the sense of being cast adrift in the world. The fluidification of identity is, instead, examined in the second part of the volume, which offers multiple examples of Collins’s reconfiguration of racial, gender and disability models.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
