Victorian Metafiction

Tabitha Sparks' book "Victorian Metafiction" explores a pattern of metafiction in Victorian novels by female authors, challenging the notion that they wrote solely about their emotions or were limited to sentimental plots. She argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority, presenting the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 212 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2022
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Critics generally agree that metafiction pertains to any novel that explicitly acknowledges its own fictional nature, although it has been predominantly linked to the postmodern era. In this groundbreaking new book, Tabitha Sparks identifies a consistent pattern of metafiction in Victorian literature that sheds light on the artistic endeavors and intentions of its female practitioners.

From the mid-nineteenth century to the fin de siècle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors exhibit a shared but overlooked trope: the fictional portrayal of the woman novelist or autobiographer.

Victorian Metafiction unveils how these novels systematically challenge the assumptions that women writers primarily focused on their emotions or were confined to trivial, sentimental plots. By countering an established tradition that has interpreted novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women employed metafictional self-consciousness to draw the readers attention to the book rather than the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively demonstrates how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the novel's subject and wrote metafiction to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780813948874