Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel

by Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles

Narrative theorists have lavished attention on beginnings and endings, but they have too often neglected the middle of narratives. In this groundbreaking collection of essays, Narrative Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel , nine literary scholars offer innovative approaches to the study of the underrepresented middle of the vast, bulky nineteenth-century multiplot novel. Combining rigorous formal analysis with established sociohistorical methods, these essays seek to account for the various ways in which the novel gave shape to British culture’s powerful obsession with middles. The capacious middle of the nineteenth-century novel provides ample room for intricately woven plots and the development of complex character systems, but it also becomes a medium for capturing, consecrating, and cultivating the middle class and its middling, middlebrow tastes as well as its mediating global role in empire. Narrative Middles explores these fascinating conjunctions in new readings of novels by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and William Morris. Amanda Claybaugh, Suzanne Daly, Amanpal Garcha, Amy King, Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Kent Puckett, Hilary Schor, and Alex Woloch.

Genres: Literary Criticism

296 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 2011

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful collection of essays on the middle of 19th century British novels. Challenges the paradigm of narrative desire/suspense driving plot forward. Challenges the idea that PLOT is what drives the narrative forward at all (alternative is usually character or description).