Description
Book SynopsisHow to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.
Trade Review"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn't actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)“Most interesting is his commentary upon the panoramic/encyclopedic nature of Victorian fiction, the commitment to recognizable generic modes, and the novelists’ interest in finding connections among diverse aspects of experience.” (
Studies in English Literature, Fall 2008)
"A broad-ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." (Times Higher Education Supplement)
Table of ContentsPreface.
1. What’s Victorian about the Victorian Novel?.
2. The Beginnings and Pickwick.
3. Vanity Fair and Victorian Realism.
4. Jane, David, and the Bildungsroman.
5. The Sensation Novel and The Woman in White.
6. Middlemarch.
Index
