The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction / / Rosemarie Bodenheimer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Bodenheimer, Rosemarie,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.)

The most telling expression of the politics of a novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer asserts, lies not in its proclaimed social intent, its continuity with nonfictional discourse, or its truth to class experience, but in the models of social movement and transformation traced out in the thread of its narrative. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction explores the story patterns and other narrative conventions through which the industrial or social-problem novel gives fictional shape to questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, and troubling in the Victorian age. Bodenheimer considers novels explicitly linked with the condition of England debates that preoccupied public-minded Victorians, narratives that confront such topics as the factory system, industrial and rural poverty, working-class politics, and the plight of women.Grouping well-known novels with less frequently read works according to shared narrative patterns, Bodenheimer delineates lines of influence, argument, and development within the subgenre of social fiction. Among the works she discusses are Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, two novels by Frances Trollope, Geraldine Jewsbury's Marian Withers, George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One. Women’s Fates and Factory Questions -- Part Two. Narrative History and the Social Record -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index