Novel Possibilities : : Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture / / Joseph W. Childers.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn eBook Package Archive 1898-1999 (pre Pub)
• VerfasserIn: Childers, Joseph W.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: New Cultural Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.)

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of-and often provided the model for-texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick's enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Possibility of the Novel -- 1. Politics and Interpretive Discourse -- 2. Fiction into Fiction -- 3. The New Generation, the Political Subject, and the Culture of Change -- 4. The Novel and the Utilitarian -- 5. Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor -- 6. Feminine Hygiene: Women in the Sanitary Condition Report -- 7. Religion, the Novel, and Speaking for/of the Other -- 8. Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism -- 9. Mary Barton and the Community of Suffering -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Backmatter