Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 [Paperback]

Nicholas Dames (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2003

With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Amnesiac Selves is a highly intelligent, stimulating work, which will keep readers in constant dialogue. Dames is a skilful close reader of texts, and moves deftly between individual analysis and general claim."--Sally Shuttleworth, Victorian Studies

"If a major challenge of analyzing the Victorian novel is the sheer excess of material, Nicholas Dames's Amnesiac Selves...brilliantly argues that forgetting that detail is central not only to interpreting those novels but to the structure of the novels themselves."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Amnesiac Selves is an insightful book, and its insights are important. Nicholas Dames develops in this helpful volume a revisionist view of memory in the early Victorian novel, a view so innovative it not only illuminates our modern perspective of the Victorian mental landscape, it reshapes it.... This careful study deserves reading. Even if you don't agree as enthusiastically as I do with Nicholas Dames' analysis of Victorian views of memory from 1810 through 1870, I will be surprised if those views don't stimulate review of your personal world view. If the way we remember the past matters, Amnesiac Selves..., with its meticulously detailed revision of our picture of Victorian memory, bears thinking about."--Steven C. Walker, Studies in the Novel

"[An] excellent study.... Dames provides a detailed and innovative account of the intersections between literary and psychological views of memory in the nineteenth century.... In charting the strategic and self-willed amnesias of the Victorians, Dames illuminates how nostalgia became a cultural habit and a way of reading the past that persists to this day."--Albion

About the Author

Nicholas Dames is at Columbia University. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195173090
• ISBN-13: 978-0195173093
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,979,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars new nostalgia, February 24, 2005

By 

Scrooge Humbug - See all my reviews

This review is from: Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Paperback)

Finally new studies of nostalgia that see it historically. I can also recommend Ann Colley's Nostalgia and Recollection and Tamar Wagner's Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia - all books that finally go away from simplifying psychobabble...

3 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (Un)forgettable!, July 18, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Hardcover)

A truly magisterial meditation on memory, this study is as notable for the insight, wit and compassion with which the author treats his subject as it is for the unparalleled level of scholarship which it displays. For anyone who has ever been an amnesiac, or has ever wanted to be a self, this book is required reading.

1 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great expectations, May 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Hardcover)

Although I have yet to read the book, I have heard fabulous things about it and its author.