Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

In this 2005 book, Ivan Kreilkamp uncovers the importance of voice and the storyteller in the Victorian novel.

Ivan Kreilkamp (Author)

9780521851930, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 November 2005

266 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

'… exciting and suggestive analysis.' The Times Literary Supplement

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp re-evaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This 2005 study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.

1. 'The best man of all': mythologies of the storyteller
2. When good speech acts go bad: the voice of industrial fiction
3. Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing
4. 'Done to death': Dickens and the author's voice
5. Unuttered: withheld speech in Jane Eyre and Villette
6. 'Hell's masterpiece of print': voice, face, and print in The Ring and the Book
7. A voice without a body: the phonographic logic of Heart of Darkness.

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