Victorian Renovations of the Novel
Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation

Original study of narrative technique in Victorian fiction from Charlotte Brontë to H. G. Wells.

Suzanne Keen (Author)

9780521583442, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 December 1997

258 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.475 kg

"Keen's style is lucid and her prose is a pleasure to read. The readings of specific novels are attentive and sensitive..." Journal of English and Germanic Philology

This study of narrative technique in Victorian novels introduces the concept of 'narrative annexes' whereby unexpected characters, impermissible subjects and plot-changing events are introduced within fictional worlds which otherwise exclude them. They are marked by the crossing of borders into previously unrepresented places and new genres or modes, challenging Victorian cultural and literary norms. Suzanne Keen's original readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Disraeli, Hardy, Kingsley, Trollope, and Wells show these writers negotiating the boundaries of representation to reveal in narrative annexes the subjects (notably sexuality and social class) which contemporary critics sought to exclude from the realm of the novel. Fears of disease, of working men, of Popery, of dark-skinned 'others', of the poor who toil and starve in close proximity to the rectories, homes, clubs and walled gardens of Victorian polite society draw readers down narrow alleys, through thorny hedges, across desolate heaths, into narrative annexes.

1. Narrative annexes: altered spaces, altered modes
2. Victorian critics, narrative annexes, and prescriptions for the novel
3. Norms and narrow spaces: the gendering of limits on representation
4. Narrative annexes, social mobility and class anxiety
5. Older, deeper, further: narrative annexes and the extent of the condition of England
6. Victorian annexes and modern form
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]