Master narratives : tellers and telling in the English novel / edited by Richard Gravil.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gravil, Richard, editor.

Series:

Nineteenth century (Aldershot, England)

Nineteenth Century Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Authors and readers--Great Britain--History.

Authors and readers.

Reader-response criticism--Great Britain.

Reader-response criticism.

Storytelling in literature.

Point of view (Literature).

Physical Description:

271 p. : ill.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London, [England] ; New York, New York : Routledge, 2016.

Summary:

Authors whose works are discussed in this collaborative book, covering a 'long' nineteenth century, include Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence. Most of the chapters focus on a single work, among them Tristram Shandy, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Middlemarch and Lord Jim, asking why, in the end, does this novel matter, and what does it invite us to 'see'. The contributors examine aspects of narrative technique which are crucial to interpretation, and which bring something new or distinctive into fiction. The introduction asks whether such experimentation may be driven by challenges to society's 'master narratives' - for instance, by a desire to circumvent the reader's ideological defences - and whether, in a radical model of canon-formation, such narrative innovation may be an aspect of canonicity.

Contents:

1. How pleasant to meet Mr. Fielding : the narrator as hero in Tome Jones / W.B. Hutchings

2. 'Where then lies the difference?' : the (ante)postmodernity of Tristram Shandy / Jayne Lewis

3. Old mortality : editor and narrator / Mary Wedd

4. Mathilda : who knew too much / Frederick Burwick

5. 'Perswasion' in Persuasion / Jane Stabler

6. Wuthering Heights as bifurcated novel / Frederick Burwick

7. Negotiating Mary Barton / Richard Gravil

8. Nell, Alice and Lizzie : three sisters amidst the grotesque / Alan Shelston

9. The androgyny of Bleak House / Richard Gravil

10. Middlemarch and 'the home epic' / Nicola Trott

11. The ghost of doubt : writing, speech and language in Lord Jim / Gerard Barrett

12. Liking or disliking : Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence / Michael O'Neill.

Notes:

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBook Central, viewed July 8, 2024).

ISBN:

1-351-91924-5

0-367-88824-6

9786612040115

1-315-24950-2

1-84760-007-7

1-282-04011-1

9781315249506

OCLC:

797832542