Description
Book Synopsis Minor characters are everywhere in novels. They linger with readers and invite us into the untold aspects of their lives. They fill a text''s landscape, bringing depth to its ecosystem, and encourage us to shift our thoughts from textual centers to margins and even to consider the minor elements of our own experiences. Minor characters challenge us to hold oppositional perspectives, rethink interdependencies, and reimagine textual and lived relationships. In many ways, we identify with minor characters, and yet we lack a nuanced way of understanding them.
This work is about minor characters and the qualities of minorness in Victorian novels. It offers casual readers and scholars alike a method of reading and rereading for minor characters that extends across genres.
Trade ReviewOverlooking minor characters in a Victorian novel, as Pregent asserts in this fresh study mingling theory with close readings, risks ignoring their integral part in forming and balancing the fictional world they inhabit. It is here on the sidelines, not necessarily in the plot's apparent center, that we should search for alternate, oppositional, and diverse voices challenging the nineteenth-century cultural status quo in compelling and deeply human ways."—Lydia Craig, associate editor of
The Charles Dickens Letters ProjectTable of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- I. Defining and Reading for Minor Characters
- 1. Minorness and Minor Characters
- 2. Peripheral Voices in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- II. From Narrators and Narratees to Implied Authors and Implied Readers
- 3. Narrators and Narratees: Boundaries, Bonds, and Minor Characters as Storytellers and Storylisteners
- 4. Empathy and the Process of Making and Receiving Minor Characters
- III. Real Authors and Real Readers
- 5. Social Authorship, J.M. Langford, and Very Minor Characters in The Way We Live Now
- 6. Social Readership and the Global Expansiveness of Thomas Hardy's Minor Characters
- 7. "An Opinion of Ireland": Thackeray's Irish Minor Characters in Vanity Fair and The Irish Sketch Book
- Conclusion
- Chapter Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
