Audrey Jaffe

Bio: Audrey Jaffe is an academic researcher from University of Toronto. The author has contributed to research in topics: Ideology & Sympathy. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 12 publications receiving 234 citations.

Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

Abstract: Part 1. Sympathy and the spirit of capitalism. Sympathy and spectacle in Dickens's "A Christmas carol" -- Detecting the beggar : Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and the construction of social identity -- part 2. Fear of falling. Under cover : sympathy and ressentiment in Gaskell's Ruth -- Isabel's spectacles : seeing value in East Lynne -- part 3. The aesthtics of cultural identity. Consenting to the fact : body, nation, and identity in Daniel Deronda -- Embodying culture : Dorian's wish.

Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience

Abstract: In traditional narrative theory, the term "omniscience" refers to a narrator's absolute knowledge and authority. Narrative theory provides no social, historical, or psychological context for omniscience, nor does it attempt to explain the predominance of omniscient narration in nineteenth-century British fiction. Audrey Jaffe uses Dickens's novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience as a problematic that has implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity, giving us new insights into Dickens and into other fiction as well. Jaffe demonstrates that omniscience is the effect of a series of oppositionsbetween narrator and character, knowledge and its absence, sympathy and irony, privacy and publicity. Showing how these oppositions participate in and enforce Victorian ideas about family, the subject, and private life, this study illuminates connections between ideology and narrative form."

Cranford and Ruth

Abstract: “The use made of fragments and small opportunities; . . . [t]hings that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worthwhile to perform, were all attended to in Cranford.” Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853) “[A] vision of a man seemed to haunt the kitchen.” Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853) Cranford and Ruth were written in tandem. For three years Gaskell ''vibrated'' back and forth between the two projects (to borrow the term she uses to describe the movement of Cranford's narrator), and then Cranford , which began as a series of stories Gaskell wrote for Charles Dickens's weekly journal Household Words , was published in one volume in June of 1853, Ruth in January of that same year. Both texts are centrally concerned with the status of women and the nature of female community; both are said to draw on Gaskell's memories of having been raised in the all-female company of her aunts Hannah Lumb and Abigail Holland in the small town of Knutsford south of Manchester. But the two works differ radically from one another, offering alternative visions, genres, and sensibilities. One is satiric, the other fairly sentimental; one is generally comic, the other chiefly tragic. One explores the nature of village life while the other focuses on a few central characters and families; one is ostensibly though not exclusively interested in what are conventionally viewed as trivial feminine concerns (tea and headgear) while the other seeks to intervene in social debates crucial to the status of Victorian women (prostitution and philanthropy).

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (an excerpt)

Abstract: The bestselling, comprehensive, and carefully researched guide to the ins-and-outs of the American class system with a detailed look at the defining factors of each group, from customs to fashion to housing. Based on careful research and told with grace and wit, Paul Fessell shows how everything people within American society do, say, and own reflects their social status. Detailing the lifestyles of each class, from the way they dress and where they live to their education and hobbies, \"Class\" is sure to entertain, enlighten, and occasionally enrage readers as they identify their own place in society and see how the other half lives.

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract: Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In "Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction" Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal

Abstract: Here’s a riddle: what invention of eighteenth-century England develops, in the course of the nineteenth century, into a major instance of and vehicle for the culture’s high valuation of sympathy and domestic life, and becomes known, worldwide, as a quintessential embodiment of English identity and a national self-image founded on an idealized vision of home? If the genre of the novel probably comes to mind, the modern domestic pet also fits the bill. If England became known as a nation of shop-keepers, it was also preeminently associated with long novels and beloved pet animals, two cultural forms which, I argue, developed not just in parallel but in tandem. Indeed, although the link has been little remarked, it seems fair to say that the history of English domestic fiction is deeply bound up with that of the domestic animal.1 In this essay I develop an argument about one aspect of that relationship through an analysis of the meanings of pethood, animality, and cruelty in the early novels of the Brontë sisters—Wuthering Heights in particular. The governess narrator of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Gray discovers, to her dismay, that the favorite “amusement” of her young charge, Tom, is to mutilate and torture baby birds: