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Index: The Trollope Prize

A Less-Beaten Path.

Nyssa Ruth Fahy: ‘Anthony Trollope’s 1859 travels through the West Indies was a generative time for the author. It not only expanded his horizons beyond continental Europe, it provided him with experiences and characters to populate multiple stories. In the languid heat of the tropics, Trollope conceived of worlds darker and more uncertain than those he had previously put to paper.’

Abstract Wealth and Community in ‘The Way We Live Now’.

Deirdre Mikolajcik; ‘While many of Anthony Trollope’s novels deal directly with swindlers and scams in the credit economy, ‘The Way We Live Now’ offers one of the best opportunities for studying the interplay of literature, economics, and community formation in the face of economic abstraction because the novel portrays a world in which economic systems are not simply the mathematical, disinterested entities economists described, but immersive, volatile systems able to shape identity.’

In medias res.

Devon Boyers: ‘In The Duke’s Children, Trollope writes in both narrative and predictive metaphor, embodying the liminal space between literary movements in which Victorian positivism intermingled with and waned against an increasing interest in empiricism.’

Feeling for the World.

Joel Simundich: ‘In a novel focused on one leader’s aims to remap the terrain of human feeling, to eliminate the kinds of weakness that make subjects cling to life long after their lives hold social value, Crasweller’s submission, despite his demonstrated health and vigor, represents a profound reversal. ‘

Resisting Redemption.

Katharine Scott: ‘Although both the story of Lily Dale and the story of the Biblical Ruth begin with a traumatic transition to intimate maternal bonds after the death or abandonment of the central male figures, Ruth’s story brings redemption both in and through the pastoral, while Lily Dale’s stagnates, and even declines to sterility. ‘

The Temporality of Realism and Romance in ‘He Knew He Was Right’.

Sarah Faulkner: ‘Though sensational fiction is historically considered to be bound to plot, recent criticism reveals its overlooked intricacies of character development. Patrick Brantlinger regards psychological interiority as one of three defining elements of sensational fiction, exemplified by novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’. Trollope’s elaborate rendering of interiority places his fiction in relation to sensational fiction.’

Performative realism.

Emily Halliwell-NacDonald: ‘As her comparison between Lufton’s love talk and his cow-talk suggest, one of the ways in which Lucy empowers her language is through the use of comedy, as she attempts to distinguish herself from the romantic Griselda Grantly.’

Love in a time of politics.

Gregory Brennen: ‘Novels do not deal well with political abstractions…”Phineas Redux” invokes the construct of marriage in order to represent and work through late Victorian political problems of expanding democracy. Marriage becomes a figure for the state, and the egalitarian marriage contract figures constitutional expansion.’

Making love in the green fields.

Molly Menickelly: ‘Darwin’s description of a perpetual struggle against the world is echoed in Trollope’s ‘Small House at Allington’—nature is not so much cruel as it is impassive. The impartiality of Trollope’s narrator and the events of his novel demonstrate an understanding of Darwinian theory. While it may be true that Trollope was no scientist, he certainly recognized the implications of Darwin’s theory for the mid-Victorian society in which he was writing.’

Battles over bits and diamonds.

Andrew Lallier: ‘However one chooses to imagine the sanctioned and the pragmatic [in ‘The Eustace Diamonds’], it is clear from the text that Trollope imagines society in a state of transition, and thus the relation between the sanctioned and the pragmatic (both of which are necessarily embedded in the social) must necessarily also be changing.’

Trollope and Self-Help.

Rebeca Richardson: ‘I read Trollope’s Autobiography as a self-help story featuring an ambitious protagonist who utilizes self-deprecation in a bid for readerly sympathy, and who depicts ambition not as a quality that threatens others, but rather, as the drive behind self-competition.’

Anthony Trollope’s ‘English tale, on English life, with clerical flavour’.

Lucy Sheehan: Even as Trollope’s maps produce a comforting image of self-contained local communities, they also expertly trace lines of power, grafting social networks onto spatial locations to provide a cartography of social and political influence.

Anthony Trollope: ‘Not so exceedingly benighted after all.’

Wilfrid L. Randell: Gifted with the facility in the spinning of paragraphs, with skill in the devising of plots, with a deft and pretty touch in the delineation of men and women, and with extraordinary method and perseverance, what could he not have accomplished with the lovelier gift of inspiration – the power to regard his art as a thing of wonder, mysteriously vital, creative, permanent!