I delineate key points in which Bulwer uses the narrator's perspective for explicitly ironic purposes, calling attention to when the narrator's sensory information does not mesh with the conclusions Bulwer expects the reader to draw. I use a method I term "spectral phenomenology," derived from Jane Bennett's phenomenology of enchantment and Lisa Blackman's articulation of mental touch, to call attention to narrative phenomena that would be imperceptible without an occult lens. Abstract: I examine Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's attempts to synthesize scientific skepticism and idealism through his supernatural novel A Strange Story (1861).He died in 1873 from an ear infection that had plagued him for years and that had eventually reached his brain.
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To a quieter life, especially as his hearing began to fail. Declining health and the complications of age led Lytton Still, the literary lion, who was by nature quiet and reserved, had honors showered on him, and was even offered the throne of Greece when the previous king abdicated. Lytton's beginning to Paul Clifford (1830), "It was a dark and stormy night," has become the butt of modern literary jokes. Many critics today tend to agree, calling it purple prose.
#A strange story edward bulwer lytton full
They argued that Lytton's writing was overly florid, extravagant, and sensational, full of murders, madmen, and magic. Despite becoming the most popular historical novelist of the Victorian era, and second only to Dickens in overall popularity, Lytton 's critics (one of whom was William Makepeace Thackeray) Lytton's novel A Strange Story (1862) is known today for influencing Dickens toĬhange the ending of Great Expectations. He shared a personal friendship with author Charles Dickens, who admired Lytton's work. Despite a trip to Italy to solve their differences, he and his wife legally separated in 1836.
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Unfortunately this decade of hard work, which included serving as a Member of Parliament, was hard on Lytton's marriage. Another work, Rienzi, Last of the Tribunes (1835), directly inspired Richard Wagner's opera of the same name. Single most popular work, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), was an instant classic. Several phrases from Lytton's books became part of the cultural vocabulary, including his most famous, "The pen is mightier than the sword." His When one of his characters insisted on wearing black toįormal dinners, it set a fashion in the real world that lasts to this day. His fiction, which was adventurous and romantic as well as intelligent and philosophical, became incredibly popular. He wrote 13 novels, poetry, essays, short stories, plays, a history of Athens, a sociological survey of English life, and reviews of the publications of others. Lytton's disapproving mother immediately stopped his allowance, and he was forced to turn to writingįor the next ten years, Lytton's literary output was phenomenal. When he returned to London, he met and married a poor but spirited Irish woman named Rosina Anne Doyle Wheeler. In 1836 Lytton spent several months in France living the dissipated life of a rich gentleman - who also wrote verse and read French He entered Cambridge University the next year and continued to write and publish as he studied.
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Sales were low, but Lytton received an acknowledgement from Scott. It was written in Byronic style and published a month shy of Lytton's seventeenth birthday.
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In 1820 his mother paid for the publication of his first work, a volume of poetryĬalled Ismael: An Oriental Tale. He was especially influenced by the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. While at school Lytton continued his love of reading and writing. "Pray, Mama, are you not sometimes overcome by the sense of your own identity?", she decided it was time her intelligent son was sent to formal schooling. Edward spent a year voraciously reading everything from chivalric romances to scholarly works. He began writing poetry by age seven, at which time the family inherited his His father died when Edward was four, and his education fell to his mother, who had already taught Edward to read.