Overview

Minor characters are everywhere in novels. They linger with readers and invite us to infer into the untold aspects of their lives. They fill a text's landscape, bringing depth to its ecosystem, and encourage us to shift our thoughts from textual centers to margins and even to consider minorness in our own experiences. In their quietness, minor characters challenge us to hold oppositional perspectives, rethink interdependencies, and reimagine textual and lived relationships. In many ways, we identify with minor characters, and yet we lack a nuanced way of reading for them. This work is about minor characters and the qualities of minorness in Victorian novels. It offers casual readers and scholars alike a method of reading and rereading for minor characters that extends across genres. Chapters trace and analyse minor characters across a range of novels including The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Vanity Fair, The Way We Live Now and more.

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9781476687278

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"Overlooking minor characters in a Victorian novel, as Pregent asserts in this fresh study mingling theory with close readings, risks ignoring their integral part in forming and balancing the fictional world they inhabit. It is here on the sidelines, not necessarily in the plot's apparent center, that we should search for alternate, oppositional, and diverse voices challenging the nineteenth-century cultural status quo in compelling and deeply human ways.""—Lydia Craig, associate editor of The Charles Dickens Letters Project"

"""Overlooking minor characters in a Victorian novel, as Pregent asserts in this fresh study mingling theory with close readings, risks ignoring their integral part in forming and balancing the fictional world they inhabit. It is here on the sidelines, not necessarily in the plot's apparent center, that we should search for alternate, oppositional, and diverse voices challenging the nineteenth-century cultural status quo in compelling and deeply human ways.""--Lydia Craig, associate editor of The Charles Dickens Letters Project"

Author Information

Grace Pregent is the associate director of the Writing Center at Michigan State University and co-directs the Community Writing Center at the East Lansing Public Library. She teaches courses in writing, community engagement, and global studies. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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