Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture

by Joseph W. Childers

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812233247
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	11/29/1995
Series:	New Cultural Studies
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.92(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)

About the Author

Joseph W. Childers is Professor of English and Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside.

Editorial Reviews

Childers (English, U. of California-Riverside) considers the role of the novel, particularly the social-problem novel of the 1840s, in interpreting and shaping the cultures of the early Victorian period. The volume's nine essays address the political novel's influence; Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; and religion, radical politics, and the industrial novel. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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