Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel / Edition 1

by Richard Gravil

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780754601289
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/18/2001
Series:	The Nineteenth Century Series
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Gravil

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction; How pleasant to meet Mr. Fielding: the narrator as hero in Tom Jones, W.B. Hutchings; ’Where then lies the difference?’: the (ante)-postmodernity of Tristram Shandy, Jayne Lewis; Old Mortality: editor and narrator, Mary Wedd; Mathilda - who knew too much, Frederick Burwick; ’Perswasion’ in Persuasion, Jane Stabler; Wuthering Heights as bifurcated novel, Frederick Burwick; Negotiating Mary Barton, Richard Gravil; Nell, Alice, Lizzie: three sisters amid the grotesque, Alan Shelston; The androgyny of Bleak House, Richard Gravil; Middlemarch and ’the Home Epic’, Nicola Trott; The ghost of doubt: writing speech and language in Lord Jim, Gerard Barrett; Liking or disliking: Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Michael O’Neill; Index.

Editorial Reviews

In a dozen essays, English scholars from North America and Britain offer new readings of evolutionary moments in the body of the novel, and moments in the history of conscience and consciousness. Most focus on a single novel, but some look at several works of an author or trace particular features across several authors. Among the works considered are , , , and . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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