Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status : Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)

Pionke, Albert D.

Edinburgh University Press（2024/08発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 248 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399507714
• DDC分類 823.809352622

Full Description

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Contents

AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Victorian Middle-Class Status and the Negative Assertion of Value

Chapter One: The Orphan Narratives of a Class Lacking AntecedentsChapter Two: Repudiations of Wealth in Victorian Financial FictionChapter Three: The Violence at the Heart of the Social Problem Novel Chapter Four: Social Domination, Social Scientific Empiricism, and Novelistic Distrust of the Modern Fact Chapter Five: Legitimizing the Subjection of Middle-Class Women in Mid-Victorian Fiction

AfterwordBibliographyIndex