"Resistant Reading" of 19th Century Literature

The study focuses on revising approaches to literary and cultural representations produced in the nineteenth century, an epoch that is an important part of cultural memory in both domestic and European contexts. It draws attention to the ambivalent nature of the persistence of the 19th Century in the present, in which there is a tension between its mediation by representations and their determining influence on the contemporary shape of cultural memory and its institutional forms. Part of their reassessment may involve not only pointing to their constructed nature, but also making visible marginalised representations that confront and carry oppositional or alternative meanings to the established ones. The study confronts two attitudes to nineteenth-century literature and culture - the subversive and the affirmative. Using the example of reflection on Victorian culture, it shows how a revising approach, a 'resisting reading', becomes a source of its actualization in the present. It also recapitulates this type of revising approaches in the context of Slovak literary historiography.