Victorian Renovations of the Novel

This study of narrative technique in Victorian novels introduces the concept of narrative annexes whereby unexpected characters, impermissible subjects and plot-changing events are introduced within fictional worlds which otherwise exclude them. They are marked by the crossing of borders into previously unrepresented places and new genres or modes, challenging Victorian cultural and literary norms. Suzanne Keen’s original readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Disraeli, Hardy, Kingsley, Trollope, and Wells show these writers negotiating the boundaries of representation to reveal in narrative annexes the subjects (notably sexuality and social class) which contemporary critics sought to exclude from the realm of the novel. Fears of disease, of working men, of Popery, of dark-skinned ‘others’, of the poor who toil and starve in close proximity to the rectories, homes, clubs and walled gardens of Victorian polite society draw readers down narrow alleys, through thorny hedges, across desolate heaths, into narrative annexes.

• Original combination of narrative theory (to which it contributes a new term) and historically based criticism of the Victorian novel • New and original readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Disraeli, Hardy, Kingsley, Trollope and H. G. Wells • Readings centre on narrative technique for introducing currently topical subjects: sexuality, class, race

1. Narrative annexes: altered spaces, altered modes; 2. Victorian critics, narrative annexes, and prescriptions for the novel; 3. Norms and narrow spaces: the gendering of limits on representation; 4. Narrative annexes, social mobility and class anxiety; 5. Older, deeper, further: narrative annexes and the extent of the condition of England; 6. Victorian annexes and modern form; Notes; Bibliography.