How the Victorian Novel Became Realistic (in a French Way), Reactionary, and Great

Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Infinite Number ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Fredric Jameson

This chapter explains how a literary-historical undoing can liberate the now-normative nineteenth-century British novel from its heavy centrality in Anglophone novel history. It explores what can be read if it is read against the grain of the entrenched sense of its “realism” and formal coherence. Once Victorian novel is separated from realism, many other nineteenth-century fictions—of the adventure, ghost, “mutiny,” and detective genres, for example—might also productively pull away from the strictures of a kind of novel that doesn't really exist. Examples of realism always seem to arrive with disclaimers, provisos, and qualifications, suggesting that no one can really be responsible for this critical fiction: it “wobbles,” as Fredric Jameson has recently argued, caught between the paradox of affect and plot. It wobbles between the antinomy of fictionality and reference, splitting off a seemingly infinite number of worlds.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

The Story of an African Farm

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olive Schreiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
New Man ◽  
Female Nurse

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.

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