How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique
introduction to the genre. Using examples from the
classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield,
Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it
demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is.
The book attempts to break free of the sense that the
Victorian novel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing,
and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity,
difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers'
strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to
create serious ''art'' and to appeal to wide audiences;
to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to
their own rich imaginative engagement with a world
heading into modernity at full speed. Broad in its
scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types
and explores the cultural and historical developments of
the novel form itself. The book also poses a series of
''big questions'' pertaining to money, capitalism,
industry, race, gender, and, at the same time, to formal
issues, such as plotting, perspective, and realist
representation.In addition, it locates the qualities
that give to the great variety of Victorian novels a
''family resemblance,'' the material conditions of their
production, their tendency to multiply plots, their
obsession with class and money, their problematic
handling of gender questions, and their commitment to
realist representation. How to Read the Victorian Novel
challenges our comfortable expectations of the genre in
order to explore intensively a burgeoning and changing
literary form which mirrors a burgeoning and changing
society. |
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