How to Read the Victorian Novel

George Levine (Author)

9781405130561, Wiley

Paperback / softback, published 13 December 2007

192 pages
23.1 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.285 kg

"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn't actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)“Any student of Victorian fiction and culture will benefit from reading this refreshing reexamination of the major Victorian novels. Recommended.” (Choice Reviews, October 2008)

"A broad-ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." Times Higher Education Supplement

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.

Preface.

1. What’s Victorian about the Victorian Novel?.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]