Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

By Albert D. Pionke

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Bront , Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1399507702
• ISBN13: 9781399507707
• Release Date: November 2022
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"