252 Pages
by
Routledge
252 Pages
by
Routledge
252 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in... Read more
Table of Contents to come
Biography
Leila Silvana May is Professor of English at North Carolina State University, USA. She is also the author of Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature.
'Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction offers persuasive readings of Victorian fiction to argue that the period saw distinct forms of duplicity emerge. May makes inspired use of early- and mid-twentieth-century sociologists Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman, who theorized secrecy as fundamental to human subjectivity and sociality. As May shows, the simultaneous social requirement for transparency on the one hand and secrecy on the other was a central paradox of Victorian fiction.' Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis, USA
