Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

By Ivan Kreilkamp

Book Overview

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Bront?, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp re-evaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This 2005 study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521111498
• ISBN13: 9780521111492
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"