Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
19 - From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The story of how the conditions of women, children, and laborers enter the nineteenth-century English novel is a story, both true and false, about making visible individuals and groups who were previously invisible. False, because these groups' invisibility is a conceit nineteenth-century novels and their critics engage in. After all, it is only because women, children, and laborers are becoming increasingly more visible and felt presences in the social world, subjects who must be reckoned with, that the need for fictive representation arises. And yet true insofar as what is made visible through nineteenth-century novels is less documentary evidence of the real state of women, children, and laborers than imaginative constructions of those subjects produced in their name. The Molls and Roxanas, Pamelas and Clarissas of fiction had already opened the space to be filled by new representations in fiction of the lives of their heirs. The gap between fiction and reality, textuality and experience, is hardly something to bemoan; the gap defines the act of representation broadly, and realism specifically. But narratives that introduce emergent subjects also do something different: because their novelistic representations are demands for social redress, they highlight the distance between the “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” they offer and the problems they set out to “solve.” They function as model ideological acts whose success lies paradoxically in their failure: their failure to paper over or mitigate the fact that the social problems they raise and represent are, in the end, “unresolvable social contradictions” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 79).
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- The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 308 - 324Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012