Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel

by Gravil,Richard; Gravil,Richard

• ISBN13: 9780754601289
• ISBN10: 0754601285
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-28
• Publisher: Routledge

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
How pleasant to meet Mr Fielding: The Narrator as Hero in Tom Jones	9	(12)
W. B. Hutchings
`Where then lies the difference?': The (Ante)Postmodernity of Tristram Shandy	21	(16)
Jayne Lewis
Old Mortality: Editor and Narrator	37	(10)
Mary Wedd
Mathilda - Who Knew Too Much	47	(8)
Frederick Burwick
`Perswasion' in Persuasion	55	(14)
Jane Stabler
Wuthering Heights as Bifurcated Novel	69	(18)
Frederick Burwick
Negotiating Mary Barton	87	(14)
Richard Gravil
Nell, Alice and Lizzie: Three Sisters amidst the Grotesque	101	(22)
Alan Shelston
The Androgyny of Bleak House	123	(16)
Richard Gravil
Middlemarch and `the Home Epic'	139	(20)
Nicola Trott
The Ghost of Doubt: Writing, Speech and Language in Lord Jim	159	(10)
Gerard Barrett
Liking or Disliking: Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence	169	(12)
Michael O'Neill
Endnotes	181	(18)
Notes on Contributors	199	(2)
Index	201