Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel

The book explores how nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news, argues that the concept of fake news was central to the development of the novel form, and demonstrates that novelistic realism develops in tension with emerging claims to reality in the newspaper press. It contributes to a new wave of scholarship on formal devices in the history of the novel and appeals to scholars in media, literary, and novel studies, as well as a broader public.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 17 May 2022
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Nineteenth-century novels have been analyzed for their formal and social workings of news, with the concept of fake news being central to the development of the novel form. This book argues that novelistic realism develops in tension with emerging claims to reality in the newspaper press, contributing to a new wave of scholarship on formal devices in the history of the novel. It draws upon a real Victorian news story in each of the first three chapters and explores how novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news, including Charles Dickens' interrogation of the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling, Anthony Trollope's exploration of novelistic bildung in serial form, the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's location of melodrama in realist discourses, and Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill's representation of a hybrid minority experience. At the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorization of the newspapers' influence on society.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474474351