Reading the Victorian Novel is a clear and engaging introduction to Victorian fiction.
In this book, Annette Federico invites readers to turn their attention to the bursting imaginations and formal inventiveness of Victorian novelists themselves. Five conventions prevailed in the building of a Victorian novel: serialisation, narration, plotting, description, and characterization. Each chapter is rich in examples of these practices and attentive to the historical and cultural contexts that shaped them, as well as to the responses and judgments of Victorian readers and contemporary scholars. Federico keeps the focus on the writer’s choices and the reader’s experience––on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history.
Reading the Victorian Novel is an appreciative and discerning guide for anyone with an interest in the resonant and vibrant worlds of nineteenth-century fiction.
1. Seriality 2. Plots 3. Picturing 4. People 5. The Storytellers
Biography
Annette Federico is Professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. She is the author of five books including Engagements with Close Reading (Routledge, 2016) and Charles Dickens: But for you, dear stranger (2022). She is also the editor of two collections of critical essays, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years (2009) and My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice (2020).
